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Title: Mere Christianity
Date of first publication: 1952
Author: C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Date first posted: June 7, 2015
Date last updated: June 7, 2015
Faded Page eBook #20150620
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MERE CHRISTIANITY
A revised and amplified edition, with a new introduction, of the three
books _Broadcast Talks_, _Christian Behaviour_ and _Beyond Personality_
by
C. S. LEWIS
GEOFFREY BLES
LONDON
_Printed in Great Britain by
The Garden City Press Ltd
Letchworth Herts
for Geoffrey Bles Ltd
52 Doughty Street London WC1_
_First Published 1952_
PREFACE
The contents of this book were first given on the air, and then
published in three separate parts as _Broadcast Talks_ (1942),
_Christian Behaviour_ (1945), and _Beyond Personality_ (1944). In the
printed versions I made a few additions to what I had said at the
microphone, but otherwise left the text much as it had been. A “talk” on
the radio should, I think, be as like real talk as possible, and should
not sound like an essay being read aloud. In my talks I had therefore
used all the contractions and colloquialisms I ordinarily use in
conversation. In the printed version I reproduced this, putting _don’t_
and _we’ve_ for _do not_ and _we have_. And wherever, in the talks, I
had made the importance of a word clear by the emphasis of my voice, I
printed it in italics. I am now inclined to think that this was a
mistake—an undesirable hybrid between the art of speaking and the art of
writing. A talker ought to use variations of voice for emphasis because
his medium naturally lends itself to that method: but a writer ought not
to use italics for the same purpose. He has his own, different, means of
bringing out the key words and ought to use them. In this edition I have
expanded the contractions and replaced most of the italics by a
recasting of the sentences in which they occurred: but without altering,
I hope, the “popular” or “familiar” tone which I had all along intended.
I have also added and deleted where I thought I understood any part of
my subject better now than ten years ago or where I knew that the
original version had been misunderstood by others.
The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is
hesitating between two Christian “denominations.” You will not learn
from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a
Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic. This omission is intentional (even in
the list I have just given the order is alphabetical). There is no
mystery about my own position. I am a very ordinary layman of the Church
of England, not especially “high,” nor especially “low,” nor especially
anything else. But in this book I am not trying to convert anyone to my
own position. Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the
best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours
was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all
Christians at all times. I had more than one reason for thinking this.
In the first place, the questions which divide Christians from one
another often involve points of high Theology or even of ecclesiastical
history, which ought never to be treated except by real experts. I
should have been out of my depth in such waters: more in need of help
myself than able to help others. And secondly, I think we must admit
that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to
bring an outsider into the Christian fold. So long as we write and talk
about them we are much more likely to deter him from entering any
Christian communion than to draw him into our own. Our divisions should
never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come
to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son.
Finally, I got the impression that far more, and more talented, authors
were already engaged in such controversial matters than in the defence
of what Baxter calls “mere” Christianity. That part of the line where I
thought I could serve best was also the part that seemed to be thinnest.
And to it I naturally went.
So far as I know, these were my only motives, and I should be very glad
if people would not draw fanciful inferences from my silence on certain
disputed matters.
For example, such silence need not mean that I myself am sitting on the
fence. Sometimes I am. There are questions at issue between Christians
to which I do not think we have been told the answer. There are some to
which I may never know the answer: if I asked them, even in a better
world, I might (for all I know) be answered as a far greater questioner
was answered: “What is that to thee? Follow thou Me.” But there are
other questions as to which I am definitely on one side of the fence,
and yet say nothing. For I was not writing to expound something I could
call “my religion,” but to expound “mere” Christianity, which is what it
is and was what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or
not.
Some people draw unwarranted conclusions from the fact that I never say
more about the Blessed Virgin Mary than is involved in asserting the
Virgin Birth of Christ. But surely my reason for not doing so is
obvious? To say more would take me at once into highly controversial
regions. And there is no controversy between Christians which needs to
be so delicately touched as this. The Roman Catholic beliefs on that
subject are held not only with the ordinary fervour that attaches to all
sincere religious belief, but (very naturally) with the peculiar and, as
it were, chivalrous sensibility that a man feels when the honour of his
mother or his beloved is at stake. It is very difficult so to dissent
from them that you will not appear to them a cad as well as a heretic.
And contrariwise, the opposed Protestant beliefs on this subject call
forth feelings which go down to the very roots of all Monotheism
whatever. To radical Protestants it seems that the distinction between
Creator and creature (however holy) is imperilled: that Polytheism is
risen again. Hence it is hard so to dissent from them that you will not
appear something worse than a heretic—a Pagan. If any topic could be
relied upon to wreck a book about “mere” Christianity—if any topic makes
utterly unprofitable reading for those who do not yet believe that the
Virgin’s son is God—surely this is it.
Oddly enough, you cannot even conclude, from my silence on disputed
points, either that I think them important or that I think them
unimportant. For this is itself one of the disputed points. One of the
things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of their
disagreements. When two Christians of different denominations start
arguing, it is usually not long before one asks whether such-and-such a
point “really matters” and the other replies: “Matter? Why, it’s
absolutely essential.”
All this is said simply in order to make clear what kind of book I was
trying to write; not in the least to conceal or evade responsibility for
my own beliefs. About those, as I said before, there is no secret. To
quote Uncle Toby: “They are written in the Common-Prayer Book.”
The danger clearly was that I should put forward as common Christianity
anything that was peculiar to the Church of England or (worse still) to
myself. I tried to guard against this by sending the original script of
what is now Book II to four clergymen (Anglican, Methodist,
Presbyterian, Roman Catholic) and asking for their criticism. The
Methodist thought I had not said enough about Faith, and the Roman
Catholic thought I had gone rather too far about the comparative
unimportance of theories in explanation of the Atonement. Otherwise all
five of us were agreed. I did not have the remaining books similarly
“vetted” because in them, though differences might arise among
Christians, these would be differences between individuals or schools of
thought, not between denominations.
So far as I can judge from reviews and from the numerous letters written
to me, the book, however faulty in other respects, did at least succeed
in presenting an agreed, or common, or central, or “mere” Christianity.
In that way it may possibly be of some help in silencing the view that,
if we omit the disputed points, we shall have left only a vague and
bloodless H.C.F. The H.C.F. turns out to be something not only positive
but pungent; divided from all non-Christian beliefs by a chasm to which
the worst divisions inside Christendom are not really comparable at all.
If I have not directly helped the cause of reunion, I have perhaps made
it clear why we ought to be reunited. Certainly I have met with little
of the fabled _odium theologicum_ from convinced members of communions
different from my own. Hostility has come more from borderline people
whether within the Church of England or without it: men not exactly
obedient to any communion. This I find curiously consoling. It is at her
centre, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really
closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine. And this suggests
that at the centre of each there is a something, or a Someone, who
against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all
memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.
So much for my omissions on doctrine. In Book III, which deals with
morals, I have also passed over some things in silence, but for a
different reason. Ever since I served as an infantryman in the first
world war I have had a great dislike of people who, themselves in ease
and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line. As a result I
have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not
exposed. No man, I suppose, is tempted to every sin. It so happens that
the impulse which makes men gamble has been left out of my make-up; and,
no doubt, I pay for this by lacking some good impulse of which it is the
excess or perversion. I therefore did not feel myself qualified to give
advice about permissible and impermissible gambling: if there is any
permissible, for I do not claim to know even that. I have also said
nothing about birth-control. I am not a woman nor even a married man,
nor am I a priest. I did not think it my place to take a firm line about
pains, dangers and expenses from which I am protected; having no
pastoral office which obliged me to do so.
Far deeper objections may be felt—and have been expressed—against my use
of the word _Christian_ to mean one who accepts the common doctrines of
Christianity. People ask: “Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is
not a Christian?”: or “May not many a man who cannot believe these
doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of
Christ, than some who do?” Now this objection is in one sense very
right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every
amiable quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without
disaster, use language as these objectors want us to use it. I will try
to make this clear by the history of another, and very much less
important, word.
The word _gentleman_ originally meant something recognisable; one who
had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone “a
gentleman” you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a
fact. If you said he was not “a gentleman” you were not insulting him,
but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John
was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that
James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said—so
rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but
usefully—“Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not
the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true
gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward
is far more truly a gentleman than John?” They meant well. To be
honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than
to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is
not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man “a gentleman” in
this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving
information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is “a
gentleman” becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to
be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no
longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the
speaker’s attitude to that object. (A “nice” meal only means a meal the
speaker likes.) _A gentleman_, once it has been spiritualised and
refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a
man whom the speaker likes. As a result, _gentleman_ is now a useless
word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for
that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants
to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has
been spoiled for that purpose.
Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as
they might say “deepening,” the sense of the word _Christian_, it too
will speedily become a useless word. In the first place, Christians
themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to
say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of
Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed
forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any
man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a
word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word. As
for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the
refined sense. It will become in their mouths simply a term of praise.
In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good
man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the
language, for we already have the word _good_. Meanwhile, the word
_Christian_ will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it
might have served.
We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name
_Christians_ was first given at Antioch (Acts xi. 26) to “the
disciples,” to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is
no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that
teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being
extended to those who in some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were
“far closer to the spirit of Christ” than the less satisfactory of the
disciples. The point is not a theological or moral one. It is only a
question of using words so that we can all understand what is being
said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of
it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is
not a Christian.
I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put
forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if
a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek
Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors
open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall
have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall,
that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait
in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.
For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I
think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to
wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain
almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is
this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees
that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will
find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would
not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as
camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the
hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the
whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true
one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain
language, the question should never be: “Do I like that kind of
service?” but “Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my
conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door
due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this
particular door-keeper?”
When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen
different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are
wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies,
then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules
common to the whole house.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface v
BOOK I. RIGHT AND WRONG AS A CLUE TO THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE
1. The Law of Human Nature 3
2. Some Objections 8
3. The Reality of the Law 13
4. What Lies Behind the Law 17
5. We Have Cause to be Uneasy 22
BOOK II. WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE
1. The Rival Conceptions of God 29
2. The Invasion 33
3. The Shocking Alternative 38
4. The Perfect Penitent 43
5. The Practical Conclusion 48
BOOK III. CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR
1. The Three Parts of Morality 55
2. The “Cardinal Virtues” 60
3. Social Morality 65
4. Morality and Psychoanalysis 70
5. Sexual Morality 75
6. Christian Marriage 82
7. Forgiveness 91
8. The Great Sin 96
9. Charity 102
10. Hope 106
11. Faith 109
12. Faith 114
BOOK IV. BEYOND PERSONALITY: OR FIRST STEPS IN THE DOCTRINE OF THE
TRINITY
1. Making and Begetting 121
2. The Three-personal God 127
3. Time and Beyond Time 132
4. Good Infection 136
5. The Obstinate Toy Soldiers 141
6. Two Notes 145
7. Let’s Pretend 148
8. Is Christianity Hard or Easy? 154
9. Counting the Cost 159
10. Nice People or New Men 163
11. The New Men 171
_BOOK I_
RIGHT AND WRONG AS A CLUE TO THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE
1
THE LAW OF HUMAN NATURE
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and
sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe
we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of
things they say. They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone
did the same to you?”—“That’s my seat, I was there first”—“Leave him
alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”—“Why should you shove in first?”
“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”—“Come on, you
promised.” People say things like that every day, educated people as
well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes
them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen
to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour
which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very
seldom replies: “To hell with your standard.” Nearly always he tries to
make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the
standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends
there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who
took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite
different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has
turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact,
very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of
fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call
it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they
might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the
human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other
man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that
unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong
are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had
committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of
football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of
Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean
things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when
the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong “the Law of
Nature,” they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that,
just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms
by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law—with
this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed
the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the
Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to
several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is
free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot
disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more
choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected
to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an
animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with
other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law
he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the
one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every
one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not
mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and
there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are
colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole,
they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to
every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the
things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying
the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis
at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they
had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still
have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than
for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent
behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations
and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their
moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total
difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral
teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese,
Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like
they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I
have put together in the appendix of another book called _The Abolition
of Man_; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think
what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where
people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt
proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You
might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.
Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish
to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or
everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself
first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to
whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed
that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says
he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same
man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you,
but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not
fair” before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not
matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the
particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties
do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong—in other
words, if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a
fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag
and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature
just like anyone else?
It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong.
People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes
get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and
opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed
about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are
really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you,
I apologise to them. They had much better read some other book, for
nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the
ordinary human beings who are left:
I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not
preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone
else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this
year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to
practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair
to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady
business about the money—the one you have almost forgotten—came when you
were very hard up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and
have never done—well, you never would have promised if you had known how
frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your
wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they
could be, I would not wonder at it—and who the dickens am I, anyway? I
am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of
Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it,
there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The
question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point
is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or
not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent
behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having
behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much—we feel
the Rule or Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face the fact
that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the
responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour
that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we
put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper
down to ourselves.
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human
beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to
behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that
they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature;
they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking
about ourselves and the universe we live in.
2
SOME OBJECTIONS
If they are the foundation, I had better stop to make that foundation
firm before I go on. Some of the letters I have had show that a good
many people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human
Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behaviour is.
For example, some people wrote to me saying, “Isn’t what you call the
Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just
like all our other instincts?” Now I do not deny that we may have a herd
instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what
it feels like to be prompted by instinct—by mother love, or sexual
instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want
or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel
just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that
desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is
quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to
or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will
probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd
instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct
for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to
these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to
follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now
this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should
be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say
that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one
note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the
keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts
are merely the keys.
Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our
instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is
nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the
stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most
conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side
with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably _want_ to be safe much
more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law
tells you to help him all the same. And surely it often tells us to try
to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is? I mean, we
often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our
imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough
steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting _from_
instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is. The
thing that says to you, “Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,”
cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note
on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note.
Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our
instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us
which was always what we call “good,” always in agreement with the rule
of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which
the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it
may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that
some of our impulses—say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others,
like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the
occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be
restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother
love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of
a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to
encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a
mother’s love for her own children or a man’s love for his own country
have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other
people’s children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such
things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not
got two kinds of notes on it, the “right” notes and the “wrong” ones.
Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral
Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something
which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct)
by directing the instincts.
By the way, this point is of great practical consequence. The most
dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature
and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is
not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an
absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe,
but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking
agreements and faking evidence in trials “for the sake of humanity,” and
become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.
Other people wrote to me saying, “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just
a social convention, something that is put into us by education?” I
think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question
are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from
parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention.
But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table
at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know
it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is
simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for
themselves and might have made different if they had liked? I fully
agree that we learn the Rule of Decent Behaviour from parents and
teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some
of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been
different—we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just as
well have been the rule to keep to the rights—and others of them, like
mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of
Human Nature belongs.
There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as
mathematics. The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though
there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and
those of another, the differences are not really very great—not nearly
so great as most people imagine—and you can recognise the same law
running through them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the
road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The
other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the
morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of
one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the
changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be
any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for
the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any
other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to
savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of
course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others.
We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral
ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or
Pioneers—people who understood morality better than their neighbours
did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can
be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a
standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly
than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something
different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some
Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right,
independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get
nearer to that real Right than others. Or put it this way. If your moral
ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be
something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about. The reason why
your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New
York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us
thinks. If when each of us said “New York” each meant merely “The town I
am imagining in my own head,” how could one of us have truer ideas than
the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In
the same way, if the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply “whatever
each nation happens to approve,” there would be no sense in saying that
any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any
other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better
or morally worse.
I conclude then, that though the differences between people’s ideas of
Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural
Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about
these differences really prove just the opposite. But one word before I
end. I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have
not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of
belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, “Three hundred
years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what
you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?” But surely the
reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are
such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going
about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural
powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their
neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all
agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy
quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the
difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in
knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not
executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call
a man humane for ceasing to set mouse-traps if he did so because he
believed there were no mice in the house.
3
THE REALITY OF THE LAW
I now go back to what I said at the end of the first chapter, that there
were two odd things about the human race. First, that they were haunted
by the idea of a sort of behaviour they ought to practise, what you
might call fair play, or decency, or morality, or the Law of Nature.
Second, that they did not in fact do so. Now some of you may wonder why
I called this odd. It may seem to you the most natural thing in the
world. In particular, you may have thought I was rather hard on the
human race. After all, you may say, what I call breaking the Law of
Right and Wrong or of Nature, only means that people are not perfect.
And why on earth should I expect them to be? That would be a good answer
if what I was trying to do was to fix the exact amount of blame which is
due to us for not behaving as we expect others to behave. But that is
not my job at all. I am not concerned at present with blame; I am trying
to find out truth. And from that point of view the very idea of
something being imperfect, of its not being what it ought to be, has
certain consequences.
If you take a thing like a stone or a tree, it is what it is and there
seems no sense in saying it ought to have been otherwise. Of course you
may say a stone is “the wrong shape” if you want to use it for a
rockery, or that a tree is a bad tree because it does not give you as
much shade as you expected. But all you mean is that the stone or the
tree does not happen to be convenient for some purpose of your own. You
are not, except as a joke, blaming them for that. You really know, that,
given the weather and the soil, the tree could not have been any
different. What we, from our point of view, call a “bad” tree is obeying
the laws of its nature just as much as a “good” one.
Now have you noticed what follows? It follows that what we usually call
the laws of nature—the way weather works on a tree for example—may not
really be _laws_ in the strict sense, but only in a manner of speaking.
When you say that falling stones always obey the law of gravitation, is
not this much the same as saying that the law only means “what stones
always do”? You do not really think that when a stone is let go, it
suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the ground. You
only mean that, in fact, it does fall. In other words, you cannot be
sure that there is anything over and above the facts themselves, any law
about what ought to happen, as distinct from what does happen. The laws
of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean “what Nature, in
fact, does.” But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of
Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not
mean “what human beings, in fact, do”; for as I said before, many of
them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely.
The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the
Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not.
In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes
in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do
behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In
the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts.
Electrons and molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results
follow, and that may be the whole story.[1] But men behave in a certain
way and that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that they
ought to behave differently.
Now this is really so peculiar that one is tempted to try to explain it
away. For instance, we might try to make out that when you say a man
ought not to act as he does, you only mean the same as when you say that
a stone is the wrong shape; namely, that what he is doing happens to be
inconvenient to you. But that is simply untrue. A man occupying the
corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who
slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both
equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the
first. I am not angry—except perhaps for a moment before I come to my
senses—with a man who trips me up by accident; I am angry with a man who
tries to trip me up even if he does not succeed. Yet the first has hurt
me and the second has not. Sometimes the behaviour which I call bad is
not inconvenient to me at all, but the very opposite. In war, each side
may find a traitor on the other side very useful. But though they use
him and pay him they regard him as human vermin. So you cannot say that
what we call decent behaviour in others is simply the behaviour that
happens to be useful to us. And as for decent behaviour in ourselves, I
suppose it is pretty obvious that it does not mean the behaviour that
pays. It means things like being content with thirty shillings when you
might have got three pounds, doing school work honestly when it would be
easy to cheat, leaving a girl alone when you would like to make love to
her, staying in dangerous places when you could go somewhere safer,
keeping promises you would rather not keep, and telling the truth even
when it makes you look a fool.
Some people say that though decent conduct does not mean what pays each
particular person at a particular moment, still, it means what pays the
human race as a whole; and that consequently there is no mystery about
it. Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot
have any real safety or happiness except in a society where every one
plays fair, and it is because they see this that they try to behave
decently. Now, of course, it is perfectly true that safety and happiness
can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and
fair and kind to each other. It is one of the most important truths in
the world. But as an explanation of why we feel as we do about Right and
Wrong it just misses the point. If we ask: “Why ought I to be
unselfish?” and you reply “Because it is good for society,” we may then
ask, “Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens
to pay _me_ personally?” and then you will have to say, “Because you
ought to be unselfish”—which simply brings us back to where we started.
You are saying what is true, but you are not getting any further. If a
man asked what was the point of playing football, it would not be much
good saying “in order to score goals,” for trying to score goals is the
game itself, not the reason for the game, and you would really only be
saying that football was football—which is true, but not worth saying.
In the same way, if a man asks what is the point of behaving decently,
it is no good replying, “in order to benefit society,” for trying to
benefit society, in other words being unselfish (for “society” after all
only means “other people”), is one of the things decent behaviour
consists in; all you are really saying is that decent behaviour is
decent behaviour. You would have said just as much if you had stopped at
the statement, “Men ought to be unselfish.”
And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be
fair. Not that men are unselfish, nor that they like being unselfish,
but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not
simply a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of
Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave.
On the other hand, it is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the
idea, and most of the things we say and think about men would be reduced
to nonsense if we did. And it is not simply a statement about how we
should like men to behave for our own convenience; for the behaviour we
call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behaviour we find
inconvenient, and may even be the opposite. Consequently, this Rule of
Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must
somehow or other be a real thing—a thing that is really there, not made
up by ourselves. And yet it is not a fact in the ordinary sense, in the
same way as our actual behaviour is a fact. It begins to look as if we
shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that,
in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the
ordinary facts of men’s behaviour, and yet quite definitely real—a real
law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.
4
WHAT LIES BEHIND THE LAW
Let us sum up what we have reached so far. In the case of stones and
trees and things of that sort, what we call the Laws of Nature may not
be anything except a way of speaking. When you say that nature is
governed by certain laws, this may only mean that nature does, in fact,
behave in a certain way. The so-called laws may not be anything
real—anything above and beyond the actual facts which we observe. But in
the case of Man, we saw that this will not do. The Law of Human Nature,
or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual
facts of human behaviour. In this case, besides the actual facts, you
have something else—a real law which we did not invent and which we know
we ought to obey.
I now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live in.
Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this
universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two
views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist
view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen
to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the
matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of
fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one
chance in a thousand something hit our sun and made it produce the
planets; and by another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for
life, and the right temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and
so some of the matter on this earth came alive; and then, by a very long
series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us.
The other view is the religious view.[2] According to it, what is behind
the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know.
That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing
to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes
we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures
like itself—I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do
not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the
other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking
men both views turn up. And note this too. You cannot find out which
view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by
experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in
the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like,
“I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2.20 a.m.
on January 15th and saw so-and-so,” or, “I put some of this stuff in a
pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.”
Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what
its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he
would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful
and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all,
and whether there is anything behind the things science
observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific
question. If there is “Something Behind,” then either it will have to
remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some
different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the
statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements
that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It
is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a
few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for
them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing
science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the
whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, “Why is there a
universe?” “Why does it go on as it does?” “Has it any meaning?” would
remain just as they were?
Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one
thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than
we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do
not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak,
inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know
that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and
cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought
to obey. Notice the following point. Anyone studying Man from the
outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language
and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but
merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence
that we had this moral law. How could he? for his observations would
only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do.
In the same way, if there were anything above or behind the observed
facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying them from
outside, could never hope to discover it.
The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know
whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or
whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that
power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a
reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it.
There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything
more, namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put
it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the
universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the
universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall
or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could
expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a
command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just
what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our
suspicions? In the only case where you can expect to get an answer, the
answer turns out to be Yes; and in the other cases, where you do not get
an answer, you see why you do not. Suppose someone asked me, when I see
a man in blue uniform going down the street leaving little paper packets
at each house, why I suppose that they contain letters? I should reply,
“Because whenever he leaves a similar little packet for me I find it
does contain a letter.” And if he then objected—“But you’ve never seen
all these letters which you think the other people are getting,” I
should say, “Of course not, and I shouldn’t expect to, because they’re
not addressed to me. I’m explaining the packets I’m not allowed to open
by the ones I am allowed to open.” It is the same about this question.
The only packet I am allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when
I open that particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on
my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to
behave in a certain way. I do not, of course, think that if I could get
inside a stone or a tree I should find exactly the same thing, just as I
do not think all the other people in the street get the same letters as
I do. I should expect, for instance, to find that the stone had to obey
the law of gravity—that whereas the sender of the letters merely tells
me to obey the law of my human nature, He compels the stone to obey the
laws of its stony nature. But I should expect to find that there was, so
to speak, a sender of letters in both cases, a Power behind the facts, a
Director, a Guide.
Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a
hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a
Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a
law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and
uncomfortable when I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like
a mind than it is like anything else we know—because after all the only
other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter
giving instructions. But, of course, it need not be very like a mind,
still less like a person. In the next chapter we shall see if we can
find out anything more about it. But one word of warning. There has been
a great deal of soft soap talked about God for the last hundred years.
That is not what I am offering. You can cut all that out.
* * * * *
Note.—In order to keep this section short enough when it was given on
the air, I mentioned only the Materialist view and the Religious view.
But to be complete I ought to mention the In-between view called
Life-Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The
wittiest expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the
most profound ones in those of Bergson. People who hold this view say
that the small variations by which life on this planet “evolved” from
the lowest forms to Man were not due to chance but to the “striving” or
“purposiveness” of a Life-Force. When people say this we must ask them
whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they
do, then “a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to
perfection” is really a God, and their view is thus identical with the
Religious. If they do not, then what is the sense in saying that
something without a mind “strives” or has “purposes”? This seems to me
fatal to their view. One reason why many people find Creative Evolution
so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of
believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you
are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe
that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice
to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through
the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you
want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind
force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like
that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The
Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want,
but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the
cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the
world has yet seen?
5
WE HAVE CAUSE TO BE UNEASY
I ended my last chapter with the idea that in the Moral Law somebody or
something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us.
And I expect when I reached that point some of you felt a certain
annoyance. You may even have thought that I had played a trick on
you—that I had been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what
turns out to be one more “religious jaw.” You may have felt you were
ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say;
but if it turns out to be only religion, well, the world has tried that
and you cannot put the clock back. If anyone is feeling that way I
should like to say three things to him.
First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I
said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is
often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that
whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting
nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong
turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on
the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to
the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the
most progressive man. We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When
I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back
and start over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing
progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And
I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty
plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We are on the
wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the
quickest way on.
Then, secondly, this has not yet turned exactly into a “religious jaw.”
We have not yet got as far as the God of any actual religion, still less
the God of that particular religion called Christianity. We have only
got as far as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We are not
taking anything from the Bible or the Churches, we are trying to see
what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam. And I want to
make it quite clear that what we find out on our own steam is something
that gives us a shock. We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody.
One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then
I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the
universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless
and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and
terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He
has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the
other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God
from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find
out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at
a house he has built. Now, from this second bit of evidence we conclude
that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right
conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and
truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given by
Christianity and some other religions, that God is “good.” But do not
let us go too fast here. The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for
thinking that God is “good” in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or
sympathetic. There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as
hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not
seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God
is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft. It is no use, at this stage,
saying that what you mean by a “good” God is a God who can forgive. You
are going too quickly. Only a Person can forgive. And we have not yet
got as far as a personal God—only as far as a power, behind the Moral
Law, and more like a mind than it is like anything else. But it may
still be very unlike a Person. If it is pure impersonal mind, there may
be no sense in asking it to make allowances for you or let you off, just
as there is no sense in asking the multiplication table to let you off
when you do your sums wrong. You are bound to get the wrong answer. And
it is no use either saying that if there is a God of that sort—an
impersonal absolute goodness—then you do not like Him and are not going
to bother about Him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on His
side and really agrees with His disapproval of human greed and trickery
and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own
case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless
the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of
behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if
there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do.
That is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by
an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless.
But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness
every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow,
and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we
cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme
terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies.
Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be
fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with
religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great
danger—according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the
wrong way.
Now my third point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this
roundabout way, I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had
a different reason. My reason was that Christianity simply does not make
sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing.
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It
therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not
know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they
need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real
Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law
and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a
moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are
sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realised that our
position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the
Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got
into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer
an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the
Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this
law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God
Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God. It is an
old story and if you want to go into it you will no doubt consult people
who have more authority to talk about it than I have. All I am doing is
to ask people to face the facts—to understand the questions which
Christianity claims to answer. And they are very terrifying facts. I
wish it was possible to say something more agreeable. But I must say
what I think true. Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion
is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not
begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it
is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going
through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort
is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for
truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will
not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to
begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the
pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did
the same about religion.
BOOK II
WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE
1
THE RIVAL CONCEPTIONS OF GOD
I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to
begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe.
If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other
religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do
have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole
world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free
to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at
least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to
persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about
the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was
able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does
mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions,
Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic—there is only
one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of
the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.
The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in
some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point,
Christianity lines up with the majority—lines up with ancient Greeks and
Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc.,
against the modern Western European materialist.
Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can
be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two
very different ideas on this subject. One of them is the idea that He is
beyond good and evil. We humans call one thing good and another thing
bad. But according to some people that is merely our human point of
view. These people would say that the wiser you become the less you
would want to call anything good or bad, and the more clearly you would
see that everything is good in one way and bad in another, and that
nothing could have been different. Consequently, these people think that
long before you got anywhere near the divine point of view the
distinction would have disappeared altogether. We call a cancer bad,
they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call
a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. It all depends on
the point of view. The other and opposite idea is that God is quite
definitely “good” or “righteous,” a God who takes sides, who loves love
and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another.
The first of these views—the one that thinks God beyond good and evil—is
called Pantheism. It was held by the great Prussian philosopher Hegel
and, as far as I can understand them, by the Hindus. The other view is
held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.
And with this big difference between Pantheism and the Christian idea of
God, there usually goes another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so
to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the
universe almost _is_ God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist
either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God. The
Christian idea is quite different. They think God invented and made the
universe—like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is
not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed. You may
say, “He’s put a lot of himself into it,” but you only mean that all its
beauty and interest has come out of his head. His skill is not in the
picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his hands. I
expect you see how this difference between Pantheists and Christians
hangs together with the other one. If you do not take the distinction
between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that
anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you
think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk
like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that
some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted
with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, “If you could only see it
from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God.”
The Christian replies, “Don’t talk damned nonsense.”[3] For Christianity
is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and
time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals
and vegetables, are things that God “made up out of His head” as a man
makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone
wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists
very loudly, on our putting them right again.
And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the
world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to
listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on
feeling “whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t
it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any
intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated
attempt to avoid the obvious?” But then that threw me back into another
difficulty.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and
unjust. But how had I got this idea of _just_ and _unjust_? A man does
not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What
was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole
show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was
supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction
against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not
a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given
up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my
own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for
the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not
simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the
very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that
the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that
one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense.
Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe
has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning:
just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no
creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. _Dark_ would be a
word without meaning.
2
THE INVASION
Very well then, atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view
that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and-water,
the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything
is all right—leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about
sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys’
philosophies.
It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are
not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting
at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made
of—all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit
my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my
brain—and, of course, you find that what we call “seeing a table” lands
you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end
of. A child saying a child’s prayer looks simple. And if you are content
to stop there, well and good. But if you are not—and the modern world
usually is not—if you want to go on and ask what is really
happening—then you must be prepared for something difficult. If we ask
for something more than simplicity, it is silly then to complain that
the something more is not simple.
Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are
not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy
Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for
a child of six and make that the object of their attack. When you try to
explain the Christian doctrine as it is really held by an instructed
adult, they then complain that you are making their heads turn round and
that it is all too complicated and that if there really were a God they
are sure He would have made “religion” simple, because simplicity is so
beautiful, etc. You must be on your guard against these people for they
will change their ground every minute and only waste your time. Notice,
too, their idea of God “making religion simple”: as if “religion” were
something God invented, and not His statement to us of certain quite
unalterable facts about His own nature.
Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It
is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you
have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun,
you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match—all
at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly
increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as
you go further from the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that
we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them
have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, and one has a
ring.
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That
is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could
not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had
always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is
not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer
twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these
boys’ philosophies—these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple
and the answer is not going to be simple either.
What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is obviously bad
and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who
know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that face
all the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that
has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have
been. The other is the view called Dualism. Dualism means the belief
that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of
everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe
is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war. I personally
think that next to Christianity Dualism is the manliest and most
sensible creed on the market. But it has a catch in it.
The two powers, or spirits, or gods—the good one and the bad one—are
supposed to be quite independent. They both existed from all eternity.
Neither of them made the other, neither of them has any more right than
the other to call itself God. Each presumably thinks it is good and
thinks the other bad. One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other
likes love and mercy, and each backs its own view. Now what do we mean
when we call one of them the Good Power and the other the Bad Power?
Either we are merely saying that we happen to prefer the one to the
other—like preferring beer to cider—or else we are saying that, whatever
the two powers think about it, and whichever we humans, at the moment,
happen to like, one of them is actually wrong, actually mistaken, in
regarding itself as good. Now if we mean merely that we happen to prefer
the first, then we must give up talking about good and evil at all. For
good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless of what you happen
to like at any given moment. If “being good” meant simply joining the
side you happened to fancy, for no real reason, then good would not
deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of the two powers is
actually wrong and the other actually right.
But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third
thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of
good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform
to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this
standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and
higher up than either of them, and He will be the real God. In fact,
what we meant by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of
them is in a right relation to the real ultimate God and the other in a
wrong relation to Him.
The same point can be made in a different way. If Dualism is true, then
the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in
reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it
is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life
people are cruel for one of two reasons—either because they are sadists,
that, is because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a
cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something
they are going to get out of it—money, or power, or safety. But
pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good
things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in
the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people
who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when
you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong
way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad
for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not
feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness
is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is
wrong—only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. In other words
badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which
goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only
spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can
be spoiled. We called sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first
have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of its being
perverted; and you can see which is the perversion, because you can
explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal
from the perverted. It follows that this Bad Power, who is supposed to
be on an equal footing with the Good Power, and to love badness in the
same way as the Good Power loves goodness, is a mere bogy. In order to
be bad he must have good things to want and then to pursue in the wrong
way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order to be
able to pervert them. But if he is bad he cannot supply himself either
with good things to desire or with good impulses to pervert. He must be
getting both from the Good Power. And if so, then he is not independent.
He is part of the Good Power’s world: he was made either by the Good
Power or by some power above them both.
Put it more simply still. To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence
and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good.
Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even to be bad he
must borrow or steal from his opponent. And do you now begin to see why
Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is
not a mere story for the children. It is a real recognition of the fact
that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable
evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which
enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good
things—resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself. That is why
Dualism, in a strict sense, will not work.
But I freely admit that real Christianity (as distinct from
Christianity-and-water) goes much nearer to Dualism than people think.
One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament
seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the
universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death
and disease, and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this
Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and
went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at
war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It
thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part
of the universe occupied by the rebel.
Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the
story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in
disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of
sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the
secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to
prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness
and intellectual snobbery. I know someone will ask me, “Do you really
mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the
devil—hoofs and horns and all?” Well, what the time of day has to do
with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and
horns. But in other respects my answer is “Yes, I do.” I do not claim to
know anything about his personal appearance. If anybody really wants to
know him better I would say to that person, “Don’t worry. If you really
want to, you will. Whether you’ll like it when you do is another
question.”
3
THE SHOCKING ALTERNATIVE
Christians, then, believe that an evil power has made himself for the
present the Prince of this World. And, of course, that raises problems.
Is this state of affairs in accordance with God’s will or not? If it is,
He is a strange God, you will say: and if it is not, how can anything
happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?
But anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in
accordance with your will in one way and not in another. It may be quite
sensible for a mother to say to the children, “I’m not going to go and
make you tidy the schoolroom every night. You’ve got to learn to keep it
tidy on your own.” Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear
and the ink and the French Grammar all lying in the grate. That is
against her will. She would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the
other hand, it is her will which has left the children free to be
untidy. The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or
school. You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do
it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible.
It is probably the same in the universe. God created things which had
free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some
people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no
possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it
is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible.
Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it
makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love
or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that
worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which
God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely,
voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and
delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a
woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be
free.
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the
wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel
inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about
disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning
power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream
can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him
you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at
all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks
this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free
will—that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real
good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a
toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings—then we may take it
it is worth paying.
When we have understood about free will, we shall see how silly it is to
ask, as somebody once asked me: “Why did God make a creature of such
rotten stuff that it went wrong?” The better stuff a creature is made
of—the cleverer and stronger and freer it is—then the better it will be
if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow
cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a
child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of
genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best—or worst—of all.
How did the Dark Power go wrong? Here, no doubt, we ask a question to
which human beings cannot give an answer with any certainty. A
reasonable (and traditional) guess, based on our own experiences of
going wrong, can, however, be offered. The moment you have a self at
all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first—wanting to be the
centre—wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that
was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man
had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake. (The story in the
Book of Genesis rather suggests that some corruption in our sexual
nature followed the fall and was its result, not its cause.) What Satan
put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could
“be like gods”—could set up on their own as if they had created
themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for
themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt
has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition,
war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of
man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as
a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would
not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to
run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to
burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no
other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our
own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness
and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such
thing.
That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended—civilisations
are built up—excellent institutions devised; but each time something
goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people
to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the
machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and
then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That
is what Satan has done to us humans.
And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of
right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying
(some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded.
Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those
queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god
who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given
new life to men. Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent
several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was—that
there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those
people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the
hammering process.
Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a
man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins.
He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world
at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like
the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with
God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He
was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language,
meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely
different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will
see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing
that has ever been uttered by human lips.
One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have
heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the
claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is
really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man
forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toe and I forgive
you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a
man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave
you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money?
Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his
conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were
forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their
sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the
party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences.
This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and
whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is
not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness
and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.
Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when
they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness
and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is
“humble and meek” and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were
merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we
could attribute to some of His sayings.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that
people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral
teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing
we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things
Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a
lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he
would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man
was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You
can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon;
or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not
come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human
teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
4
THE PERFECT PENITENT
We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are
talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic,
or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a
lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or
unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.
And now, what was the purpose of it all? What did He come to do? Well,
to teach, of course; but as soon as you look into the New Testament or
any other Christian writing you will find they are constantly talking
about something different—about His death and His coming to life again.
It is obvious that Christians think the chief point of the story lies
there. They think the main thing He came to earth to do was to suffer
and be killed.
Now before I became a Christian I was under the impression that the
first thing Christians had to believe was one particular theory as to
what the point of this dying was. According to that theory God wanted to
punish men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ
volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let us off. Now I admit
that even this theory does not seem to me quite so immoral and so silly
as it used to; but that is not the point I want to make. What I came to
see later on was that neither this theory nor any other is Christianity.
The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us
right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did
this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held
as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does
work. I will tell you what I think it is like. All sensible people know
that if you are tired and hungry a meal will do you good. But the modern
theory of nourishment—all about the vitamins and proteins—is a different
thing. People ate their dinners and felt better long before the theory
of vitamins was ever heard of: and if the theory of vitamins is some day
abandoned they will go on eating their dinners just the same. Theories
about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about
how it works. Christians would not all agree as to how important these
theories are. My own church—the Church of England—does not lay down any
one of them as the right one. The Church of Rome goes a bit further. But
I think they will all agree that the thing itself is infinitely more
important than any explanations that theologians have produced. I think
they would probably admit that no explanation will ever be quite
adequate to the reality. But as I said in the preface to this book, I am
only a layman, and at this point we are getting into deep water. I can
only tell you, for what it is worth, how I, personally, look at the
matter.
On my view the theories are not themselves the thing you are asked to
accept. Many of you no doubt have read Jeans or Eddington. What they do
when they want to explain the atom, or something of that sort, is to
give you a description out of which you can make a mental picture. But
then they warn you that this picture is not what the scientists actually
believe. What the scientists believe is a mathematical formula. The
pictures are there only to help you to understand the formula. They are
not really true in the way the formula is; they do not give you the real
thing but only something more or less like it. They are only meant to
help, and if they do not help you can drop them. The thing itself cannot
be pictured, it can only be expressed mathematically. We are in the same
boat here. We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in
history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows
through into our own world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of
which our own world is built, of course we are not going to be able to
picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it,
that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be—the
inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking
down into nature like lightning. You may ask what good it will be to us
if we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man can eat
his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man
can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he
certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out
our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the
formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any
theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my
view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they
do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with
the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking
at.
The one most people have heard is the one I mentioned before—the one
about our being let off because Christ had volunteered to bear a
punishment instead of us. Now on the face of it that is a very silly
theory. If God was prepared to let us off, why on earth did He not do
so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent
person instead? None at all that I can see, if you are thinking of
punishment in the police-court sense. On the other hand, if you think of
a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying
it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take “paying the
penalty,” not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general
sense of “standing the racket” or “footing the bill,” then, of course,
it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got
himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a
kind friend.
Now what was the sort of “hole” man had got himself into? He had tried
to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other
words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs
improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your
arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been
on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the
ground floor—that is the only way out of our “hole.” This process of
surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call
repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder
than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit
and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of
years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In
fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a
bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The
worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only
person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would
not need it.
Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a
kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take
you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a
description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take
you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back
without going back. It cannot happen. Very well, then, we must go
through with it. But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us
unable to do it. Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean
when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of
Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and
that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is
how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its
hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because
you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons
and holds our hand while we do it. Now if we had not fallen, that would
be all plane sailing. But unfortunately we now need God’s help in order
to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all—to
surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God’s nature
corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we
now need God’s leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature,
has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own
nature, He has not.
But supposing God became a man—suppose our human nature which can suffer
and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person—then that person
could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because
He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I
can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it
only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if
we men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only
because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot
share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a
man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us
what He Himself need not suffer at all.
I have heard some people complain that if Jesus was God as well as man,
then His sufferings and death lose all value in their eyes, “because it
must have been so easy for Him.” Others may (very rightly) rebuke the
ingratitude and ungraciousness of this objection; what staggers me is
the misunderstanding it betrays. In one sense, of course, those who make
it are right. They have even understated their own case. The perfect
submission, the perfect suffering, the perfect death were not only
easier to Jesus because He was God, but were possible only because He
was God. But surely that is a very odd reason for not accepting them?
The teacher is able to form the letters for the child because the
teacher is grown-up and knows how to write. That, of course, makes it
easier for the teacher; and only because it is easier for him can he
help the child. If it rejected him because “it’s easy for grown-ups” and
waited to learn writing from another child who could not write itself
(and so had no “unfair” advantage), it would not get on very quickly. If
I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank
may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back (between
my gasps) “No, it’s not fair! You have an advantage! You’re keeping one
foot on the bank”? That advantage—call it “unfair” if you like—is the
only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for
help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
Such is my own way of looking at what Christians call the Atonement. But
remember this is only one more picture. Do not mistake it for the thing
itself: and if it does not help you, drop it.
5
THE PRACTICAL CONCLUSION
The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect
because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man. Now
the Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and
suffering of Christ we shall also share in His conquest of death and
find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and
perfectly happy, creatures. This means something much more than our
trying to follow His teaching. People often ask when the next step in
evolution—the step to something beyond man—will happen. But on the
Christian view, it has happened already. In Christ a new kind of man
appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into
us.
How is this to be done? Now, please remember how we acquired the old,
ordinary kind of life. We derived it from others, from our father and
mother and all our ancestors, without our consent—and by a very curious
process, involving pleasure, pain, and danger. A process you would never
have guessed. Most of us spend a good many years in childhood trying to
guess it: and some children, when they are first told, do not believe
it—and I am not sure that I blame them, for it is very odd. Now the God
who arranged that process is the same God who arranges how the new kind
of life—the Christ life—is to be spread. We must be prepared for it
being odd too. He did not consult us when He invented sex: He has not
consulted us either when He invented this.
There are three things that spread the Christ life to us: baptism,
belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by
different names—Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper. At least,
those are the three ordinary methods. I am not saying there may not be
special cases where it is spread without one or more of these. I have
not time to go into special cases, and I do not know enough. If you are
trying in a few minutes to tell a man how to get to Edinburgh you will
tell him the trains: he can, it is true, get there by boat or by a
plane, but you will hardly bring that in. And I am not saying anything
about which of these three things is the most essential. My Methodist
friend would like me to say more about belief and less (in proportion)
about the other two. But I am not going into that. Anyone who professes
to teach you Christian doctrine will, in fact, tell you to use all
three, and that is enough for our present purpose.
I cannot myself see why these things should be the conductors of the new
kind of life. But then, if one did not happen to know, I should never
have seen any connection between a particular physical pleasure and the
appearance of a new human being in the world. We have to take reality as
it comes to us: there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be
like or what we should have expected it to be like. But though I cannot
see why it should be so, I can tell you why I believe it is so. I have
explained why I have to believe that Jesus was (and is) God. And it
seems plain as a matter of history that He taught His followers that the
new life was communicated in this way. In other words, I believe it on
His authority. Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things
on authority only means believing them because you have been told them
by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent. of the things
you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place
as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract
reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable
people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System,
atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority—because
the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is
believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the
defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you
prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who
did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on
authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people
do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.
Do not think I am setting up baptism and belief and the Holy Communion
as things that will do instead of your own attempts to copy Christ. Your
natural life is derived from your parents; that does not mean it will
stay there if you do nothing about it. You can lose it by neglect, or
you can drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and
look after it: but always remember you are not making it, you are only
keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way a Christian
can lose the Christ-life which has been put into him, and he has to make
efforts to keep it. But even the best Christian that ever lived is not
acting on his own steam—he is only nourishing or protecting a life he
could never have acquired by his own efforts. And that has practical
consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a
lot towards repairing that body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal,
as a dead body would not. A live body is not one that never gets hurt,
but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a
Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to
repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each
stumble—because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the
time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary
death which Christ Himself carried out.
That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people
who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if
there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to
deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he
does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will
love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He
loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun
because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.
And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life
is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they
speak of being “in Christ” or of Christ being “in them,” this is not
simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying
Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the
whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ
acts—that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. And
perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life
is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts
like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an
idea; it is more like evolution—a biological or super-biological fact.
There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant
man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material
things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think
this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He
likes matter. He invented it.
Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully
unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of
Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not
told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know
that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only
those who know Him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you
are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you
can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ’s body, the
organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him
to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own
little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a
man’s fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.
Another possible objection is this. Why is God landing in this
enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society
to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is
it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to
land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying.
He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not
suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till
the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our
side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to
interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be
like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When
the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to
invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side
then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream
and something else—something it never entered your head to
conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so
terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this
time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it
will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every
creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use
saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.
That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we
discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before
or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.
God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever.
We must take it or leave it.
BOOK III
CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR
1
THE THREE PARTS OF MORALITY
There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was
like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was “The sort of
person who is always snooping round to see if anyone is enjoying himself
and then trying to stop it.” And I am afraid that is the sort of idea
that the word Morality raises in a good many people’s minds: something
that interferes, something that stops you having a good time. In
reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every
moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction,
in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to
be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations. When you are
being taught how to use any machine, the instructor keeps on saying,
“No, don’t do it like that,” because, of course, there are all sorts of
things that look all right and seem to you the natural way of treating
the machine, but do not really work.
Some people prefer to talk about moral “ideals” rather than moral rules
and about moral “idealism” rather than moral obedience. Now it is, of
course, quite true that moral perfection is an “ideal” in the sense that
we cannot achieve it. In that sense every kind of perfection is, for us
humans, an ideal; we cannot succeed in being perfect car drivers or
perfect tennis players or in drawing perfectly straight lines. But there
is another sense in which it is very misleading to call moral perfection
an ideal. When a man says that a certain woman, or house, or ship, or
garden is “his ideal” he does not mean (unless he is rather a fool) that
everyone else ought to have the same ideal. In such matters we are
entitled to have different tastes and, therefore, different ideals. But
it is dangerous to describe a man who tries very hard to keep the moral
law as a “man of high ideals,” because this might lead you to think that
moral perfection was a private taste of his own and that the rest of us
were not called on to share it. This would be a disastrous mistake.
Perfect behaviour may be as unattainable as perfect gear-changing when
we drive; but it is a necessary ideal prescribed for all men by the very
nature of the human machine just as perfect gear-changing is an ideal
prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars. And it would be
even more dangerous to think of oneself as a person “of high ideals”
because one is trying to tell no lies at all (instead of only a few
lies) or never to commit adultery (instead of committing it only seldom)
or not to be a bully (instead of being only a moderate bully). It might
lead you to become a prig and to think you were rather a special person
who deserved to be congratulated on his “idealism.” In reality you might
just as well expect to be congratulated because, whenever you do a sum,
you try to get it quite right. To be sure, perfect arithmetic is “an
ideal”; you will certainly make some mistakes in some calculations. But
there is nothing very fine about trying to be quite accurate at each
step in each sum. It would be idiotic not to try; for every mistake is
going to cause you trouble later on. In the same way every moral failure
is going to cause trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself.
By talking about rules and obedience instead of “ideals” and “idealism”
we help to remind ourselves of these facts.
Now let us go a step further. There are two ways in which the human
machine goes wrong. One is when human individuals drift apart from one
another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage, by
cheating or bullying. The other is when things go wrong inside the
individual—when the different parts of him (his different faculties and
desires and so on) either drift apart or interfere with one another. You
can get the idea plain if you think of us as a fleet of ships sailing in
formation. The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the
ships do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if
each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order. As a matter of
fact, you cannot have either of these two things without the other. If
the ships keep on having collisions they will not remain seaworthy very
long. On the other hand, if their steering gears are out of order they
will not be able to avoid collisions. Or, if you like, think of humanity
as a band playing a tune. To get a good result, you need two things.
Each player’s individual instrument must be in tune and also each must
come in at the right moment so as to combine with all the others.
But there is one thing we have not yet taken into account. We have not
asked where the fleet is trying to get to, or what piece of music the
band is trying to play. The instruments might be all in tune and might
all come in at the right moment, but even so the performance would not
be a success if they had been engaged to provide dance music and
actually played nothing but Dead Marches. And however well the fleet
sailed, its voyage would be a failure if it were meant to reach New York
and actually arrived at Calcutta.
Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with
fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be
called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual.
Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was
made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the
conductor of the band wants it to play.
You may have noticed that modern people are nearly always thinking about
the first thing and forgetting the other two. When people say in the
newspapers that we are striving for Christian moral standards, they
usually mean that we are striving for kindness and fair play between
nations, and classes, and individuals; that is, they are thinking only
of the first thing. When a man says about something he wants to do, “It
can’t be wrong because it doesn’t do anyone else any harm,” he is
thinking only of the first thing. He is thinking it does not matter what
his ship is like inside provided that he does not run into the next
ship. And it is quite natural, when we start thinking about morality, to
begin with the first thing, with social relations. For one thing, the
results of bad morality in that sphere are so obvious and press on us
every day: war and poverty and graft and lies and shoddy work. And also,
as long as you stick to the first thing, there is very little
disagreement about morality. Almost all people at all times have agreed
(in theory) that human beings ought to be honest and kind and helpful to
one another. But though it is natural to begin with all that, if our
thinking about morality stops there, we might just as well not have
thought at all. Unless we go on to the second thing—the tidying up
inside each human being—we are only deceiving ourselves.
What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid
collisions if, in fact, they are such crazy old tubs that they cannot be
steered at all? What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for
social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill
temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do
not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about
improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that
all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing
but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make
any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular
kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as
long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of
carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good
by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why
we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the
individual.
But I do not think we can stop there either. We are now getting to the
point at which different beliefs about the universe lead to different
behaviour. And it would seem, at first sight, very sensible to stop
before we got there, and just carry on with those parts of morality that
all sensible people agree about. But can we? Remember that religion
involves a series of statements about facts, which must be either true
or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the
right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite a different
set. For example, let us go back to the man who says that a thing cannot
be wrong unless it hurts some other human being. He quite understands
that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, but he honestly
thinks that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But
does it not make a great difference whether his ship is his own property
or not? Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak,
the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to
the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then
I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply
belonged to myself.
Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going
to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a
good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were
going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about
very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or
my jealousy are gradually getting worse—so gradually that the increase
in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute
hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the
precisely correct technical term for what it would be. And immortality
makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the
difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live
only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which
may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But
if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important
but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a
state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.
It seems, then, that if we are to think about morality, we must think of
all three departments: relations between man and man: things inside each
man: and relations between man and the power that made him. We can all
co-operate in the first one. Disagreements begin with the second and
become serious with the third. It is in dealing with the third that the
main differences between Christian and non-Christian morality come out.
For the rest of this book I am going to assume the Christian point of
view, and look at the whole picture as it will be if Christianity is
true.
2
THE “CARDINAL VIRTUES”
The previous section was originally composed to be given as a short talk
on the air.
If you are allowed to talk for only ten minutes, pretty well everything
else has to be sacrificed to brevity. One of my chief reasons for
dividing morality up into three parts (with my picture of the ships
sailing in convoy) was that this seemed the shortest way of covering the
ground. Here I want to give some idea of another way in which the
subject has been divided by old writers, which was too long to use in my
talk, but which is a very good one.
According to this longer scheme there are seven “virtues.” Four of them
are called “Cardinal” virtues, and the remaining three are called
“Theological” virtues. The “Cardinal” ones are those which all civilised
people recognise: the “Theological” are those which, as a rule, only
Christians know about. I shall deal with the Theological ones later on:
at present I am talking about the four Cardinal virtues. (The word
“cardinal” has nothing to do with “Cardinals” in the Roman Church. It
comes from a Latin word meaning “the hinge of a door.” These were called
“cardinal” virtues because they are, as we should say, “pivotal.”) They
are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude.
Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out
what you are doing and what is likely to come of it. Nowadays most
people hardly think of Prudence as one of the “virtues.” In fact,
because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like
children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are “good,”
it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the
first place, most children show plenty of “prudence” about doing the
things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly.
In the second place, as St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we
were to remain children in _intelligence_: on the contrary, He told us
to be not only “as harmless as doves,” but also “as wise as serpents.”
He wants a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head. He wants us to be
simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children
are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at
its job, and in first-class fighting trim. The fact that you are giving
money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out
whether that charity is a fraud or not. The fact that what you are
thinking about is God Himself (for example, when you are praying) does
not mean that you can be content with the same babyish ideas which you
had when you were a five-year old. It is, of course, quite true that God
will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen
to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people
with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they
have. The proper motto is not “Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be
clever,” but “Be good, sweet maid, and don’t forget that this involves
being as clever as you can.” God is no fonder of intellectual slackers
than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian,
I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the
whole of you, brains and all. But, fortunately, it works the other way
round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find
his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no
special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education
itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write
a book that has astonished the whole world.
Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its
meaning. It now usually means teetotalism. But in the days when the
second Cardinal virtue was christened “Temperance,” it meant nothing of
the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all
pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and
no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be
teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion.
Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any
Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either
because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking
too much, or because he wants to give the money to the poor, or because
he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage
them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining,
for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he
likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of a certain type
of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting
every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An
individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for
special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the
moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking
down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong
turning.
One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of
the word Temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget
that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man
who makes his golf or his motor-bicycle the centre of his life, or a
woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is
being just as “intemperate” as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of
course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or
golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God
is not deceived by externals.
Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law
courts. It is the old name for everything we should now call “fairness”;
it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, and
all that side of life. And Fortitude includes both kinds of courage—the
kind that faces danger as well as the kind that “sticks it” under pain.
“Guts” is perhaps the nearest modern English. You will notice, of
course, that you cannot practise any of the other virtues very long
without bringing this one into play.
There is one further point about the virtues that ought to be noticed.
There is a difference between doing some particular just or temperate
action and being a just or temperate man. Someone who is not a good
tennis player may now and then make a good shot. What you mean by a good
player is the man whose eye and muscles and nerves have been so trained
by making innumerable good shots that they can now be relied on. They
have a certain tone or quality which is there even when he is not
playing, just as a mathematician’s mind has a certain habit and outlook
which is there even when he is not doing mathematics. In the same way a
man who perseveres in doing just actions gets in the end a certain
quality of character. Now it is that quality rather than the particular
actions which we mean when we talk of a “virtue.”
This distinction is important for the following reason. If we thought
only of the particular actions we might encourage three wrong ideas.
(1) We might think that, provided you did the right thing, it did not
matter how or why you did it—whether you did it willingly or
unwillingly, sulkily or cheerfully, through fear of public opinion or
for its own sake. But the truth is that right actions done for the wrong
reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called a
“virtue,” and it is this quality or character that really matters. (If
the bad tennis player hits very hard, not because he sees that a very
hard stroke is required, but because he has lost his temper, his stroke
might possibly, by luck, help him to win that particular game; but it
will not be helping him to become a reliable player.)
(2) We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules:
whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.
(3) We might think that the “virtue” were necessary only for this
present life—that in the other world we could stop being just because
there is nothing to quarrel about and stop being brave because there is
no danger. Now it is quite true that there will probably be no occasion
for just or courageous acts in the next world, but there will be every
occasion for being the sort of people that we can become only as the
result of doing such acts here. The point is not that God will refuse
you admission to His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities
of character: the point is that if people have not got at least the
beginnings of those qualities inside them, then no possible external
conditions could make a “Heaven” for them—that is, could make them happy
with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness God intends for us.
3
SOCIAL MORALITY
The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and
man is that in this department Christ did not come to preach any brand
new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be
done by) is a summing up of what every one, at bottom, had always known
to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new
moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said,
“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”
The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time
after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not
to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused
to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that
it wants to shirk.
The second thing to get clear is that Christianity has not, and does not
profess to have, a detailed political programme for applying “Do as you
would be done by” to a particular society at a particular moment. It
could not have. It is meant for all men at all times and the particular
programme which suited one place or time would not suit another. And,
anyhow, that is not how Christianity works. When it tells you to feed
the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to
read the Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or
even in English grammar. It was never intended to replace or supersede
the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will
set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give
them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal.
People say, “The Church ought to give us a lead.” That is true if they
mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By
the Church they ought to mean the whole body of practising Christians.
And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to
mean that some Christians—those who happen to have the right
talents—should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and
statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics
and economics should be directed to putting “Do as you would be done by”
into action. If that happened, and if we others were really ready to
take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social
problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a lead from
the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political
programme. That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within
the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look
after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live for ever: and
we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not
been trained. The job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of
Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come
from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters: just as
Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists—not
from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and
novels in their spare time.
All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a
pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like.
Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to
be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to
eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every
one’s work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of
silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy
them. And there is to be no “swank” or “side,” no putting on airs. To
that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On
the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience—obedience (and
outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed
magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to
be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a
cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or
anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New
Testament hates what it calls “busybodies.”
If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I
think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that
its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, “advanced,”
but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old
fashioned—perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would
like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the
whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is the
total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total
plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own
modification of the original plan is the plan itself. You will find this
again and again about anything that is really Christian: every one is
attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the
rest. That is why we do not get much further: and that is why people who
are fighting for quite opposite things can both say they are fighting
for Christianity.
Now another point. There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient
heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great
Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system
has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at
interest: and lending money at interest—what we call investment—is the
basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are
wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians
agreed in forbidding interest (or “usury” as they called it), they could
not foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the
private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what
they said. That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist
and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible
for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian
economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that
three great civilisations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in
condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.
One more point and I am done. In the passage where the New Testament
says that every one must work, it gives as a reason “in order that he
may have something to give to those in need.” Charity—giving to the
poor—is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening
parable of the sheep and the goats it seems to be the point on which
everything turns. Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be
unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be
producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be
quite right in saying that we ought to produce that kind of society. But
if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the
meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality. I do
not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the
only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our
expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the
standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are
probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or
hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we
should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure
excludes them. I am speaking now of “charities” in the common way.
Particular cases of distress among your own relatives, friends,
neighbours or employees, which God, as it were, forces upon your notice,
may demand much more: even to the crippling and endangering of your own
position. For many of us the great obstacle to charity lies not in our
luxurious living or desire for more money, but in our fear—fear of
insecurity. This must often be recognised as a temptation. Sometimes our
pride also hinders our charity; we are tempted to spend more than we
ought on the showy forms of generosity (tipping, hospitality) and less
than we ought on those who really need our help.
And now, before I end, I am going to venture on a guess as to how this
section has affected any who have read it. My guess is that there are
some Leftist people among them who are very angry that it has not gone
further in that direction, and some people of an opposite sort who are
angry because they think it has gone much too far. If so, that brings us
right up against the real snag in all this drawing up of blueprints for
a Christian society. Most of us are not really approaching the subject
in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in
the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own
party. We are looking for an ally where we are offered either a Master
or—a Judge. I am just the same. There are bits in this section that I
wanted to leave out. And that is why nothing whatever is going to come
of such talks unless we go a much longer way round. A Christian society
is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not
going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat “Do as
you would be done by” till I am black in the face, but I cannot really
carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to
love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn
to love God except by learning to obey Him. And so, as I warned you, we
are driven on to something more inward—driven on from social matters to
religious matters. For the longest way round is the shortest way home.
4
MORALITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
I have said that we should never get a Christian society unless most of
us became Christian individuals. That does not mean, of course, that we
can put off doing anything about society until some imaginary date in
the far future. It means that we must begin both jobs at once—(1) the
job of seeing how “Do as you would be done by” can be applied in detail
to modern society, and (2) the job of becoming the sort of people who
really would apply it if we saw how. I now want to begin considering
what the Christian idea of a good man is—the Christian specification for
the human machine.
Before I come down to details there are two more general points I should
like to make. First of all, since Christian morality claims to be a
technique for putting the human machine right, I think you would like to
know how it is related to another technique which seems to make a
similar claim—namely, psychoanalysis.
Now you want to distinguish very clearly between two things: between the
actual medical theories and technique of the psychoanalysts, and the
general philosophical view of the world which Freud and some others have
gone on to add to this. The second thing—the philosophy of Freud—is in
direct contradiction to Christianity: and also in direct contradiction
to the other great psychologist, Jung. And furthermore, when Freud is
talking about how to cure neurotics he is speaking as a specialist on
his own subject, but when he goes on to talk general philosophy he is
speaking as an amateur. It is therefore quite sensible to attend to him
with respect in the one case and not in the other—and that is what I do.
I am all the readier to do it because I have found that when he is
talking off his own subject and on a subject I do know something about
(namely, languages) he is very ignorant. But psychoanalysis itself,
apart from all the philosophical additions that Freud and others have
made to it, is not in the least contradictory to Christianity. Its
technique overlaps with Christian morality at some points and it would
not be a bad thing if every parson knew something about it: but it does
not run the same course all the way, for the two techniques are doing
rather different things.
When a man makes a moral choice two things are involved. One is the act
of choosing. The other is the various feelings, impulses and so on which
his psychological outfit presents him with, and which are the raw
material of his choice. Now this raw material may be of two kinds.
Either it may be what we would call normal: it may consist of the sort
of feelings that are common to all men. Or else it may consist of quite
unnatural feelings due to things that have gone wrong in his
subconscious. Thus fear of things that are really dangerous would be an
example of the first kind: an irrational fear of cats or spiders would
be an example of the second kind. The desire of a man for a woman would
be of the first kind: the perverted desire of a man for a man would be
of the second. Now what psychoanalysis undertakes to do is to remove the
abnormal feelings, that is, to give the man better raw material for his
acts of choice: morality is concerned with the acts of choice
themselves.
Put it this way. Imagine three men who go to a war. One has the ordinary
natural fear of danger that any man has and he subdues it by moral
effort and becomes a brave man. Let us suppose that the other two have,
as a result of things in their subconsciousness, exaggerated, irrational
fears, which no amount of moral effort can do anything about. Now
suppose that a psychoanalyst comes along and cures these two: that is,
he puts them both back in the position of the first man. Well it is just
then that the psychoanalytical problem is over and the moral problem
begins. Because, now that they are cured, these two men might take quite
different lines. The first might say, “Thank goodness I’ve got rid of
all those doo-dahs. Now at last I can do what I always wanted to do—my
duty to my country.” But the other might say, “Well, I’m very glad that
I now feel moderately cool under fire, but, of course, that doesn’t
alter the fact that I’m still jolly well determined to look after Number
One and let the other chap do the dangerous job whenever I can. Indeed
one of the good things about feeling less frightened is that I can now
look after myself much more efficiently and can be much cleverer at
hiding the fact from the others.” Now this difference is a purely moral
one and psychoanalysis cannot do anything about it. However much you
improve the man’s raw material, you have still got something else: the
real, free choice of the man, on the material presented to him, either
to put his own advantage first or to put it last. And this free choice
is the only thing that morality is concerned with.
The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not
need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very
important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God
judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a
pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some
good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more
courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man
who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the
right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some
cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being
sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than
you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite
nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and
a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as
fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had
been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad
upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why
Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s
choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the
raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man’s
psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies
all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that
chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand
naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were
really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of
nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off
others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really
was. There will be surprises.
And that leads on to my second point. People often think of Christian
morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, “If you keep a lot of
rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.” I do
not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say
that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of
you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different
from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your
innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this
central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish
creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with
other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of
war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.
To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace
and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy,
rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is
progressing to the one state or the other.
That explains what always used to puzzle me about Christian writers;
they seem to be so very strict at one moment and so very free and easy
at another. They talk about mere sins of thought as if they were
immensely important: and then they talk about the most frightful murders
and treacheries as if you had only got to repent and all would be
forgiven. But I have come to see that they are right. What they are
always thinking of is the mark which the action leaves on that tiny
central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will
have to endure—or enjoy—for ever. One man may be so placed that his
anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however
angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the
soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself
which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the
rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does
fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that
twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long
run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen
from the outside, is not what really matters.
One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not
only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better he
understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him.
When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and
less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad
man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand
sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see
mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are
making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of
drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know
about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.
5
SEXUAL MORALITY
We must now consider Christian morality as regards sex, what Christians
call the virtue of chastity. The Christian rule of chastity must not be
confused with the social rule of “modesty” (in one sense of that word);
i.e. propriety, or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how
much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be
referred to, and in what words, according to the customs of a given
social circle. Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all
Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes. A girl in the
Pacific islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady
completely covered in clothes might both be equally “modest,” proper, or
decent, according to the standards of their own societies: and both, for
all we could tell by their dress, might be equally chaste (or equally
uhchaste). Some of the language which chaste women used in Shakespeare’s
time would have been used in the nineteenth century only by a woman
completely abandoned. When people break the rule of propriety current in
their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in
themselves or others, then they are offending against chastity. But if
they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of
bad manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly in order to
shock or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but
they are being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure in
making other people uncomfortable. I do not think that a very strict or
fussy standard of propriety is any proof of chastity or any help to it,
and I therefore regard the great relaxation and simplifying of the rule
which has taken place in my own lifetime as a good thing. At its present
stage, however, it has this inconvenience, that people of different ages
and different types do not all acknowledge the same standard, and we
hardly know where we are. While this confusion lasts I think that old,
or old-fashioned, people should be very careful not to assume that young
or “emancipated” people are corrupt whenever they are (by the old
standard) improper; and, in return, that young people should not call
their elders prudes or puritans because they do not easily adopt the new
standard. A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to
make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no
getting away from it: the Christian rule is, “Either marriage, with
complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.” Now
this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously
either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has
gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it
is the instinct which has gone wrong.
But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex
is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the
body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we
want, it is quite true that most of us will eat too much: but not
terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not
eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological
purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his
sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a
baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This
appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.
Of take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a
strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now
suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply
bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the
cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that
it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that
in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And
would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was
something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such strip-tease
acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that
country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as
the strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual
starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found
that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible
explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step
would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or
little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed
that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to
abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one. In
the same way, before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the
strip-tease, we should have to look for evidence that there is in fact
more sexual abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like
the strip-tease were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence.
Contraceptives have made sexual indulgence far less costly within
marriage and far safer outside it than ever before, and public opinion
is less hostile to illicit unions and even to perversion than it has
been since Pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis of “starvation” the only
one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our
other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about
food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like
titillations.
Here is a third point. You find very few people who want to eat things
that really are not food or to do other things with food instead of
eating it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare.
But perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and
frightful. I am sorry to have to go into all these details, but I must.
The reason why I must is that you and I, for the last twenty years, have
been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told,
till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state
as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the
silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will
be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away
from the propaganda, you see that it is not.
They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for
the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has been chattered
about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been
the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it
has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race
originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess. Modern people
are always saying, “Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.” They may mean two
things. They may mean “There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact
that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact
that it gives pleasure.” If they mean that, they are right. Christianity
says the same. It is not the thing, nor the pleasure, that is the
trouble. The old Christian teachers said that if man had never fallen,
sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually
have been greater. I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as
if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in
themselves. But they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of
the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes
that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that
some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going
to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.
Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and
nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by
Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity
contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say, “Sex is
nothing to be ashamed of,” they may mean “the state into which the
sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of.”
If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to
be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food:
there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food
the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at
pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. I do not say you
and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our
ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this
respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of
unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed
in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an
obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance. God knows our
situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to
overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to
overcome them.
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish
for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is
difficult. It is easy to think that we want something when we do not
really want it. A famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a
young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realised
that while his lips had been saying, “Oh Lord, make me chaste,” his
heart had been secretly adding, “But please don’t do it just yet.” This
may happen in prayers for other virtues too; but there are three reasons
why it is now specially difficult for us to desire—let alone to
achieve—complete chastity.
In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all
the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the
desires we are resisting are so “natural,” so “healthy,” and so
reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.
Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the
idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth,
frankness, and good humour. Now this association is a lie. Like all
powerful lies, it is based on a truth—the truth, acknowledged above,
that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have
grown round it) is “normal” and “healthy,” and all the rest of it. The
lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are
tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any
conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense.
Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease,
jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of
health, good humour, and frankness. For any happiness, even in this
world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim
made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable,
counts for nothing. Every sane and civilised man must have some set of
principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to
permit others. One man does this on Christian principles, another on
hygienic principles, another on sociological principles. The real
conflict is not between Christianity and “nature,” but between Christian
principles and other principles in the control of “nature.” For “nature”
(in the sense of natural desire) will have to be controlled anyway,
unless you are going to ruin your whole life. The Christian principles
are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will
get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the
others.
In the second place, many people are deterred from seriously attempting
Christian chastity because they think (before trying) that it is
impossible. But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think
about possibility or impossibility. Faced with an optional question in
an examination paper, one considers whether one can do it or not: faced
with a compulsory question, one must do the best one can. You may get
some marks for a very imperfect answer: you will certainly get none for
leaving the question alone. Not only in examinations but in war, in
mountain climbing, in learning to skate, or swim, or ride a bicycle,
even in fastening a stiff collar with cold fingers, people quite often
do what seemed impossible before they did it. It is wonderful what you
can do when you have to.
We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity—like perfect charity—will
not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God’s
help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time
that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind.
After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.
Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but
just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity
(or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process
trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures
our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn,
on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best
moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst,
for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down
content with anything less than perfection.
Thirdly, people often misunderstand what psychology teaches about
“repressions.” It teaches us that “repressed” sex is dangerous. But
“repressed” is here a technical term: it does not mean “suppressed” in
the sense of “denied” or “resisted.” A repressed desire or thought is
one which has been thrust into the subconscious (usually at a very early
age) and can now come before the mind only in a disguised and
unrecognisable form. Repressed sexuality does not appear to the patient
to be sexuality at all. When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in
resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is
he in the least danger of creating a repression. On the contrary, those
who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know
a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come
to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes
knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about
leaky pipes. Virtue—even attempted virtue—brings light; indulgence
brings fog.
Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to
make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality
is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the
supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they
are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely
spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing
and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of
power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the
human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the
Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is
why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far
nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be
neither.
6
CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
The last chapter was mainly negative. I discussed what was wrong with
the sexual impulse in man, but said very little about its right
working—in other words, about Christian marriage. There are two reasons
why I do not particularly want to deal with marriage. The first is that
the Christian doctrines on this subject are extremely unpopular. The
second is that I have never been married myself, and, therefore, can
speak only at second hand. But in spite of that, I feel I can hardly
leave the subject out in an account of Christian morals.
The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and
wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words
“one flesh” would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that
when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a
fact—just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key
are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical
instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its
two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together
in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined. The
monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who
indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from
all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and
make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there
is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the
pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and
try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the
pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things
and spitting them out again.
As a consequence, Christianity teaches that marriage is for life. There
is, of course, a difference here between different Churches: some do not
admit divorce at all; some allow it reluctantly in very special cases.
It is a great pity that Christians should disagree about such a
question; but for an ordinary layman the thing to notice is that the
Churches all agree with one another about marriage a great deal more
than any of them agrees with the outside world. I mean, they all regard
divorce as something like cutting up a living body, as a kind of
surgical operation. Some of them think the operation so violent that it
cannot be done at all; others admit it as a desperate remedy in extreme
cases. They are all agreed that it is more like having both your legs
cut off than it is like dissolving a business partnership or even
deserting a regiment. What they all disagree with is the modern view
that it is a simple readjustment of partners, to be made whenever people
feel they are no longer in love with one another, or when either of them
falls in love with someone else.
Before we consider this modern view in its relation to chastity, we must
not forget to consider it in relation to another virtue, namely justice.
Justice, as I said before, includes the keeping of promises. Now
everyone who has been married in a church has made a public, solemn
promise to stick to his (or her) partner till death. The duty of keeping
that promise has no special connection with sexual morality: it is in
the same position as any other promise. If, as modern people are always
telling us, the sexual impulse is just like all our other impulses, then
it ought to be treated like all our other impulses; and as their
indulgence is controlled by our promises, so should its be. If, as I
think, it is not like all our other impulses, but is morbidly inflamed,
then we should be specially careful not to let it lead us into
dishonesty.
To this someone may reply that he regarded the promise made in church as
a mere formality and never intended to keep it. Whom, then, was he
trying to deceive when he made it? God? That was really very unwise.
Himself? That was not very much wiser. The bride, or bridegroom, or the
“in-laws”? That was treacherous. Most often, I think, the couple (or one
of them) hoped to deceive the public. They wanted the respectability
that is attached to marriage without intending to pay the price: that
is, they were imposters, they cheated. If they are still contented
cheats, I have nothing to say to them: who would urge the high and hard
duty of chastity on people who have not yet wished to be merely honest?
If they have now come to their senses and want to be honest, their
promise, already made, constrains them. And this, you will see, comes
under the heading of justice, not that of chastity. If people do not
believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should
live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean
to keep. It is true that by living together without marriage they will
be guilty (in Christian eyes) of fornication. But one fault is not
mended by adding another: unchastity is not improved by adding perjury.
The idea that “being in love” is the only reason for remaining married
really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If
love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it
adds nothing, then it should not be made. The curious thing is that
lovers themselves, while they remain really in love, know this better
than those who talk about love. As Chesterton pointed out, those who are
in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises. Love
songs all over the world are full of vows of eternal constancy. The
Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is
foreign to that passion’s own nature: it is demanding that lovers should
take seriously something which their passion of itself impels them to
do.
And, of course, the promise, made when I am in love and because I am in
love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being
true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that
I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a
certain way. He might as well promise never to have a headache or always
to feel hungry. But what, it may be asked, is the use of keeping two
people together if they are no longer in love? There are several sound,
social reasons; to provide a home for their children, to protect the
woman (who has probably sacrificed or damaged her own career by getting
married) from being dropped whenever the man is tired of her. But there
is also another reason of which I am very sure, though I find it a
little hard to explain.
It is hard because so many people cannot be brought to realise that when
B is better than C, A may be even better than B. They like thinking in
terms of good and bad, not of good, better, and best, or bad, worse and
worst. They want to know whether you think patriotism a good thing: if
you reply that it is, of course, far better than individual selfishness,
but that it is inferior to universal charity and should always give way
to universal charity when the two conflict, they think you are being
evasive. They ask what you think of duelling. If you reply that it is
far better to forgive a man than to fight a duel with him, but that even
a duel might be better than a lifelong enmity which expresses itself in
secret efforts to “do the man down,” they go away complaining that you
would not give them a straight answer. I hope no one will make this
mistake about what I am now going to say.
What we call “being in love” is a glorious state, and, in several ways,
good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our
eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it
subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that
sense, love is the great conqueror of lust. No one in his senses would
deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or
cold self-centredness. But, as I said before, “the most dangerous thing
you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as
the thing you ought to follow at all costs.” Being in love is a good
thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but
there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole
life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling
can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all.
Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings
come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called “being
in love” usually does not last. If the old fairy-tale ending “They lived
happily ever after” is taken to mean “They felt for the next fifty years
exactly as they felt the day before they were married,” then it says
what probably never was nor ever could be true, and would be highly
undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for
even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your
sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be “in love” need
not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct
from “being in love”—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity,
maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit;
reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners
ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even
at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself
even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when
each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be “in love” with someone
else. “Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter
love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the
engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started
it.
If you disagree with me, of course, you will say, “He knows nothing
about it, he is not married.” You may quite possibly be right. But
before you say that, make quite sure that you are judging me by what you
really know from your own experience and from watching the lives of your
friends, and not by ideas you have derived from novels and films. This
is not so easy to do as people think. Our experience is coloured through
and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and
skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for
ourselves.
People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person
you may expect to go on “being in love” for ever. As a result, when they
find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and
are entitled to a change—not realising that, when they have changed, the
glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the
old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at
the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first
idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is
really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some
delightful place dies away when you really go to live there. Does this
mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the
beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it,
the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter
and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find
words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who
are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the
sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some
quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and become a
good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to
live in the beauty spot will discover gardening.
This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a
thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good
trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let
the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into
the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are
living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make
thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they
will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a
bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so
few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women
maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons
ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much
better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly)
trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a
small boy.
Another notion we get from novels and plays is that “falling in love” is
something quite irresistible; something that just happens to one, like
measles. And because they believe this, some married people throw up the
sponge and give in when they find themselves attracted by a new
acquaintance. But I am inclined to think that these irresistible
passions are much rarer in real life than in books, at any rate when one
is grown up. When we meet someone beautiful and clever and sympathetic,
of course we ought, in one sense, to admire and love these good
qualities. But is it not very largely in our own choice whether this
love shall, or shall not, turn into what we call “being in love”? No
doubt, if our minds are full of novels and plays and sentimental songs,
and our bodies full of alcohol, we shall turn any love we feel into that
kind of love: just as if you have a rut in your path all the rainwater
will run into that rut, and if you wear blue spectacles everything you
see will turn blue. But that will be our own fault.
Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two
things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of
marriage is one: the other is the quite different question—how far
Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to
force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying
them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you
are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for
every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry
if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.
My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the
majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot
be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct
kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all
citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on
her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man
knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.
So much for the Christian doctrine about the permanence of marriage.
Something else, even more unpopular, remains to be dealt with. Christian
wives promise to obey their husbands. In Christian marriage the man is
said to be the “head.” Two questions obviously arise here, (1) Why
should there be a head at all—why not equality? (2) Why should it be the
man?
(1) The need for some head follows from the idea that marriage is
permanent. Of course, as long as the husband and wife are agreed, no
question of a head need arise; and we may hope that this will be the
normal state of affairs in a Christian marriage. But when there is a
real disagreement, what is to happen? Talk it over, of course; but I am
assuming they have done that and still failed to reach agreement. What
do they do next? They cannot decide by a majority vote, for in a council
of two there can be no majority. Surely, only one or other of two things
can happen: either they must separate and go their own ways or else one
or other of them must have a casting vote. If marriage is permanent, one
or other party must, in the last resort, have the power of deciding the
family policy. You cannot have a permanent association without a
constitution.
(2) If there must be a head, why the man? Well, firstly, is there any
very serious wish that it should be the woman? As I have said, I am not
married myself, but as far as I can see, even a woman who wants to be
the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of
things when she finds it going on next door. She is much more likely to
say “Poor Mr. X! Why he allows that appalling woman to boss him about
the way she does is more than I can imagine.” I do not think she is even
very flattered if anyone mentions the fact of her own “headship.” There
must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands,
because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and despise the
husbands whom they rule. But there is also another reason; and here I
speak quite frankly as a bachelor, because it is a reason you can see
from outside even better than from inside. The relations of the family
to the outer world—what might be called its foreign policy—must depend,
in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and
usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily
fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world.
Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her,
all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests. The
function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers
is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other
people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts
this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child
next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you
sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or,
if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you
admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his
tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours
as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?
7
FORGIVENESS
I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the
Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one
even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, “Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself.” Because in Christian morals “thy
neighbour” includes “thy enemy,” and so we come up against this terrible
duty of forgiving our enemies.
Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something
to forgive, as we had during the war. And then, to mention the subject
at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think
this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful
and contemptible. “That sort of talk makes them sick,” they say. And
half of you already want to ask me, “I wonder how you’d feel about
forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?”
So do I. I wonder very much. Just as when Christianity tells me that I
must not deny my religion even to save myself from death by torture, I
wonder very much what I should do when it came to the point. I am not
trying to tell you in this book what I could do—I can do precious
little—I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And
there, right in the middle of it, I find “Forgive us our sins as we
forgive those that sin against us.” There is no slightest suggestion
that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly
clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no
two ways about it. What are we to do?
It is going to be hard enough, anyway, but I think there are two things
we can do to make it easier. When you start mathematics you do not begin
with the calculus; you begin with simple addition. In the same way, if
we really want (but all depends on really wanting) to learn how to
forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the
Gestapo. One might start with forgiving one’s husband or wife, or
parents or children, or the nearest N.C.O., for something they have done
or said in the last week. That will probably keep us busy for the
moment. And secondly, we might try to understand exactly what loving
your neighbour as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself.
Well, how exactly do I love myself?
Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of
fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own
society. So apparently “Love your neighbour” does not mean “feel fond of
him” or “find him attractive.” I ought to have seen that before,
because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I
think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I
sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not
why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes
me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself.
So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either.
That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that
forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such
bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step
further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself
a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of
the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am
allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I
come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago
that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as
they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting
distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But
years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been
doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my
own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had
never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason
why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved
myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those
things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one
atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate
them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.
But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things
in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and
hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he
can be cured and made human again.
The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in
the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the
story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.
Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as
that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to
cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies
as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the
first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into
devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little
blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see
grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall
insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves
included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for
ever in a universe of pure hatred.
Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No,
for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to
punishment—even to death. If one had committed a murder, the right
Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be
hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian
judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an
enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and
long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace. It
is no good quoting “Thou shalt not kill.” There are two Greek words: the
ordinary word to _kill_ and the word to _murder_. And when Christ quotes
that commandment He uses the _murder_ one in all three accounts,
Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And I am told there is the same distinction in
Hebrew. All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse
is adultery. When soldiers came to St. John the Baptist asking what to
do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor
did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major—what they called a
centurion. The idea of the knight—the Christian in arms for the defence
of a good cause—is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dreadful
thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is
entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of
semi-pacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though
you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you
were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent
young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to,
something which is the natural accompaniment of courage—a kind of gaiety
and wholeheartedness.
I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served
in the first world war, I and some young German had killed each other
simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I
cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even
any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.
I imagine somebody will say, “Well, if one is allowed to condemn the
enemy’s acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left
between Christian morality and the ordinary view?” All the difference in
the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore,
what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central,
inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run,
into a heavenly or a hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we
must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must
not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of
resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply
killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will
never feel it any more. That is not how things happen. I mean that every
time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives
long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is
not impossible. Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about
the enemy as we feel about ourselves—to wish that he were not bad, to
hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish
his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his
good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.
I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about
them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it
simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the
same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sum ready
worked out in our own case to show us how it works. We have then to go
on and apply the rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it
easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice,
attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the
things called selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love:
creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give
it up is like giving up beer or tobacco. . . .
8
THE GREAT SIN
I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most
sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the
world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in
someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever
imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that
they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls
or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever
heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at
the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian,
who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which
makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious
of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike
it in others.
The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue
opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may
remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that
the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have
come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice,
the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and
all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that
the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the
complete anti-God state of mind.
Does this seem to you exaggerated? If so, think it over. I pointed out a
moment ago that the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in
others. In fact, if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest
way is to ask yourself, “How much do I dislike it when other people snub
me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or
patronise me, or show off?” The point is that each person’s pride is in
competition with every one else’s pride. It is because I wanted to be
the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being
the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. Now what you want to get
clear is that Pride is _essentially_ competitive—is competitive by its
very nature—while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by
accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of
having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of
being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud
of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If every
one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be
nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud:
the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition
has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially
competitive in a way the other vices are not. The sexual impulse may
drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl. But that
is only by accident; they might just as likely have wanted two different
girls. But a proud man will take your girl from you, not because he
wants her, but just to prove to himself that he is a better man than
you. Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go
round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly
want, will try to get still more just to assert his power. Nearly all
those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness
are really far more the result of Pride.
Take it with money. Greed will certainly make a man want money, for the
sake of a better house, better holidays, better things to eat and drink.
But only up to a point. What is it that makes a man with £10,000 a year
anxious to get £20,000 a year? It is not the greed for more pleasure.
£10,000 will give all the luxuries that any man can really enjoy. It is
Pride—the wish to be richer than some other rich man, and (still more)
the wish for power. For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys:
there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to
move them about like toy soldiers. What makes a pretty girl spread
misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her
sexual instinct: that kind of girl is quite often sexually frigid. It is
Pride. What is it that makes a political leader or a whole nation go on
and on, demanding more and more? Pride again. Pride is competitive by
its very nature: that is why it goes on and on. If I am a proud man,
then, as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful, or
richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy.
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of
misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other
vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship
and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But
Pride always means enmity—it _is_ enmity. And not only enmity between
man and man, but enmity to God.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect
immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and,
therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at
all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always
looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are
looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite
obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to
themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an
imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the
presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how
He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people:
that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out
of it a pound’s worth of Pride towards their fellow-men. I suppose it
was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would
preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the
end of the world that He had never known them. And any of us may at any
moment be in this death-trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find
that our religious life is making us feel that we are good—above all,
that we are better than someone else—I think we may be sure that we are
being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in
the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether
or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about
yourself altogether.
It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle
itself into the very centre of our religious life. But you can see why.
The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through
our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at
all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it
is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be
used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to
a boy’s Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave
decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper by
learning to think that they are beneath his dignity—that is, by Pride.
The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and
brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in
you the Dictatorship of Pride—just as he would be quite content to see
your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer.
For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love,
or contentment, or even common sense.
Before leaving this subject I must guard against some possible
misunderstandings:
(1) Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on
the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by
her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says “Well done,” are pleased
and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in
the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted)
to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, “I have
pleased him; all is well,” to thinking, “What a fine person I must be to
have done it.” The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight
in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you delight wholly in
yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the
bottom. That is why vanity, though it is the sort of Pride which shows
most on the surface, is really the least bad and most pardonable sort.
The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration, too much and is
always angling for it. It is a fault, but a childlike and even (in an
odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely
contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to
want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human. The real black,
diabolical Pride comes when you look down on others so much that you do
not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right, and often
our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the right
reason; namely, because we care so incomparably more what God thinks.
But the Proud man has a different reason for not caring. He says “Why
should I care for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were
worth anything? And even if their opinions were of value, am I the sort
of man to blush with pleasure at a compliment like some chit of a girl
at her first dance? No, I am an integrated, adult personality. All I
have done has been done to satisfy my own ideals—or my artistic
conscience—or the traditions of my family—or, in a word, because I’m
That Kind of Chap. If the mob like it, let them. They’re nothing to me.”
In this way real thorough-going Pride may act as a check on vanity; for,
as I said a moment ago, the devil loves “curing” a small fault by giving
you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in
our Pride to cure our vanity; better the frying-pan than the fire.
(2) We say in English that a man is “proud” of his son, or his father,
or his school, or regiment, and it may be asked whether “pride” in this
sense is a sin. I think it depends on what, exactly, we mean by “proud
of.” Very often, in such sentences, the phrase “is proud of” means “has
a warm-hearted admiration for.” Such an admiration is, of course, very
far from being a sin. But it might, perhaps, mean that the person in
question gives himself airs on the ground of his distinguished father,
or because he belongs to a famous regiment. This would, clearly, be a
fault; but even then, it would be better than being proud simply of
himself. To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one
step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long
as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.
(3) We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is
offended at it, or that Humility is something He demands as due to His
own dignity—as if God Himself was proud. He is not in the least worried
about His dignity. The point is, He wants you to know Him: wants to give
you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you
really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be
humble—delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for
once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has
made you restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you
humble in order to make this moment possible: trying to take off a lot
of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up and
are strutting about like the little idiots we are. I wish I had got a
bit further with humility myself: if I had, I could probably tell you
more about the relief, the comfort, of taking the fancy-dress
off—getting rid of the false self, with all its “Look at me” and “Aren’t
I a good boy?” and all its posing and posturing. To get even near it,
even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.
(4) Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what
most people call “humble” nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy,
smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody.
Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful,
intelligent chap who took a real interest in what _you_ said to _him_.
If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of
anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about
humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the
first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a
biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If
you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
9
CHARITY
I said in an earlier chapter that there were four “Cardinal” virtues and
three “Theological” virtues. The three Theological ones are Faith, Hope,
and Charity. Faith is going to be dealt with in the last two chapters.
Charity was partly dealt with in Chapter 7, but there I concentrated on
that part of Charity which is called Forgiveness. I now want to add a
little more.
First, as to the meaning of the word. “Charity” now means simply what
used to be called “alms”—that is, giving to the poor. Originally it had
a much wider meaning. (You can see how it got the modern sense. If a man
has “charity,” giving to the poor is one of the most obvious things he
does, and so people came to talk as if that were the whole of charity.
In the same way, “rhyme” is the most obvious thing about poetry, and so
people come to mean by “poetry” simply rhyme and nothing more.) Charity
means “Love, in the Christian sense.” But love, in the Christian sense,
does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the
will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves,
and must learn to have about other people.
I pointed out in the chapter on Forgiveness that our love for ourselves
does not mean that we _like_ ourselves. It means that we wish our own
good. In the same way Christian Love (or Charity) for our neighbours is
quite a different thing from liking or affection. We “like” or are “fond
of” some people, and not of others. It is important to understand that
this natural “liking” is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your
likes and dislikes in food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact.
But, of course, what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous.
Natural liking or affection for people makes it easier to be
“charitable” towards them. It is, therefore, normally a duty to
encourage our affections—to “like” people as much as we can (just as it
is often our duty to encourage our liking for exercise or wholesome
food)—not because this liking is itself the virtue of charity, but
because it is a help to it. On the other hand, it is also necessary to
keep a very sharp look-out for fear our liking for some one person makes
us uncharitable, or even unfair, to someone else. There are even cases
where our liking conflicts with our charity towards the person we like.
For example, a doting mother may be tempted by natural affection to
“spoil” her child; that is, to gratify her own affectionate impulses at
the expense of the child’s real happiness later on.
But though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be
quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying
to manufacture affectionate feelings. Some people are “cold” by
temperament; that may be a misfortune for them, but it is no more a sin
than having a bad digestion is a sin; and it does not cut them out from
the chance, or excuse them from the duty, of learning charity. The rule
for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether
you “love” your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we
find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved
someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you
dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good
turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one
exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law
of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to
put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his “gratitude,” you
will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very
quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we
do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by
God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have
learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.
Consequently, though Christian charity sounds a very cold thing to
people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite
distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference
between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has
only affections or “likings” and the Christian has only “charity.” The
worldly man treats certain people kindly because he “likes” them: the
Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more
and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have
imagined himself liking at the beginning.
This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The
Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them:
afterwards they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them.
The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate,
the more cruel you will become—and so on in a vicious circle for ever.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little
decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The
smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which,
a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never
dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is
the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy
may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
Some writers use the word charity to describe not only Christian love
between human beings, but also God’s love for man and man’s love for
God. About the second of these two, people are often worried. They are
told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in
themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act
as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself,
“If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?” When you have found
the answer, go and do it.
On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about
than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even
if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.
Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the
will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment,
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.” He will give us feelings of love if
He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand
them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our
feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our
sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its
determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to
us, at whatever cost to Him.
10
HOPE
Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual
looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people
think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a
Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the
present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the
Christians who did most for the present world were just those who
thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the
conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle
Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left
their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with
Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other
world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and
you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.
It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in
other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make
health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and
imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get
health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open
air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation as long as
civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else
even more.
Most of us find it very difficult to want “Heaven” at all—except in so
far as “Heaven” means meeting again our friends who have died. One
reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole
education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that
when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognise it.
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts,
would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be
had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that
offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The
longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of
some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are
longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.
I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful
marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best
possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment
of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows
what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may
have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but
something has evaded us. Now there are two wrong ways of dealing with
this fact, and one right one.
(1) The Fool’s Way.—He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes
on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went
for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he
really would catch the mysterious something we are all after. Most of
the bored, discontented, rich people in the world are of this type. They
spend their whole lives trotting from woman to woman (through the
divorce courts), from continent to continent, from hobby to hobby,
always thinking that the latest is “the Real Thing” at last, and always
disappointed.
(2) The Way of the Disillusioned “Sensible Man.”—He soon decides that
the whole thing was moonshine. “Of course,” he says, “one feels like
that when one’s young. But by the time you get to my age you’ve given up
chasing the rainbow’s end.” And so he settles down and learns not to
expect too much and represses the part of himself which used, as he
would say, “to cry for the moon.” This is, of course, a much better way
than the first, and makes a man much happier, and less of a nuisance to
society. It tends to make him a prig (he is apt to be rather superior
towards what he calls “adolescents”), but, on the whole, he rubs along
fairly comfortably. It would be the best line we could take if man did
not live for ever. But supposing infinite happiness really is there,
waiting for us? Supposing one really can reach the rainbow’s end? In
that case it would be a pity to find out too late (a moment after death)
that by our supposed “common sense” we had stifled in ourselves the
faculty of enjoying it.
(3) The Christian Way.—The Christian says, “Creatures are not born with
desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels
hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim:
well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well,
there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no
experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is
that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures
satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably
earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it,
to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one
hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings,
and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which
they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in
myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after
death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make
it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help
others to do the same.”
There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the
Christian hope of “Heaven” ridiculous by saying they do not want “to
spend eternity playing harps.” The answer to such people is that if they
cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk
about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is,
of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible.
Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all)
music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly
suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact
that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and
power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven
(gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these
symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be
like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.
11
FAITH
I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith.
Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two
senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first
sense it means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the
doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle
people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard
faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on earth it can be a
virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a
set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or
rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but
because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about
the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad
man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the
evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that
would be merely stupid.
Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then—and a
good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the
human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on
regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns
up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by
reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly
convinced by good evidence that anæsthetics do not smother me and that
properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious.
But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the
table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic
begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid
they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other
words, I lose my faith in anæsthetics. It is not reason that is taking
away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my
imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one
side and emotion and imagination on the other.
When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man
knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his
acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be
trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in
that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, “Perhaps she’ll be
different this time,” and once more makes a fool of himself and tells
her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions
have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a
boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an
unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen
dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he
will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his
hand and leaves him unsupported in the water—or whether he will suddenly
cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking
anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the
weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which
Faith comes in. But supposing a man’s reason once decides that the
weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to
happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there
is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other
people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up
and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a
moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very
pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some
way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would
be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his
wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments
at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have
to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments
when a mere mood rises up against it.
Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of
holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your
changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes.
I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in
which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I
had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion
of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is
why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where
they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound
atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs
really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.
Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.
The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next
is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some
of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for
some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and
churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be
continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any
other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And
as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their
faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have
been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply
drift away?
Now I must turn to Faith in the second or higher sense: and this is the
most difficult thing I have tackled yet. I want to approach it by going
back to the subject of Humility. You may remember I said that the first
step towards humility was to realise that one is proud. I want to add
now that the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the
Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for
the first week. Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can
see, fallen back completely or even fallen lower than the point one
began from, one will have discovered some truths about oneself. No man
knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea
is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is
an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong
it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by
fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a
wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in
to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have
been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very
little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving
in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until
we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never
yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what
temptation means—the only complete realist. Very well, then. The main
thing we learn from a serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues
is that we fail. If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of
exam. and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be
wiped out. If there was any idea of a sort of bargain—any idea that we
could perform our side of the contract and thus put God in our debt so
that it was up to Him, in mere justice, to perform His—any side—that has
to be wiped out.
I think every one who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a
Christian, has the idea of an exam. or of a bargain in his mind. The
first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits. When
they find it blown into bits, some people think this means that
Christianity is a failure and give up. They seem to imagine that God is
very simple-minded. In fact, of course, He knows all about this. One of
the very things Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to
bits. God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that
there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam. or putting Him
in your debt.
Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of
thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by
God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His
service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own
already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving
anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a
small child going to its father and saying, “Daddy, give me sixpence to
buy you a birthday present.” Of course, the father does, and he is
pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but
only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the
transaction. When a man has made these two discoveries God can really
get to work. It is after this that real life begins. The man is awake
now. We can now go on to talk of Faith in the second sense.
12
FAITH
I want to start by saying something that I would like everyone to notice
carefully. It is this. If this chapter means nothing to you, if it seems
to be trying to answer questions you never asked, drop it at once. Do
not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity
that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a
Christian. But there are a great many things that cannot be understood
until after you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road.
These things are purely practical, though they do not look as if they
were. They are directions for dealing with particular cross-roads and
obstacles on the journey and they do not make sense until a man has
reached those places. Whenever you find any statement in Christian
writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry. Leave it alone.
There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what
it meant. If one could understand it now, it would only do one harm.
Of course all this tells against me as much as anyone else. The thing I
am going to try to explain in this chapter may be ahead of me. I may be
thinking I have got there when I have not. I can only ask instructed
Christians to watch very carefully, and tell me when I go wrong; and
others to take what I say with a grain of salt—as something offered,
because it may be a help, not because I am certain that I am right.
I am trying to talk about Faith in the second sense, the higher sense. I
said just now that the question of Faith in this sense arises after a
man has tried his level best to practise the Christian virtues, and
found that he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be
giving back to God what was already God’s own. In other words, he
discovers his bankruptcy. Now, once again, what God cares about is not
exactly our actions. What he cares about is that we should be creatures
of a certain kind or quality—the kind of creatures He intended us to
be—creatures related to Himself in a certain way. I do not add “and
related to one another in a certain way,” because that is included: if
you are right with Him you will inevitably be right with all your
fellow-creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel are fitted
rightly into the hub and the rim they are bound to be in the right
positions to one another. And as long as a man is thinking of God as an
examiner who has set him a sort of paper to do, or as the opposite party
in a sort of bargain—as long as he is thinking of claims and
counter-claims between himself and God—he is not yet in the right
relation to Him. He is misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And
he cannot get into the right relation until he has discovered the fact
of our bankruptcy.
When I say “discovered,” I mean really discovered: not simply said it
parrot-fashion. Of course, any child, if given a certain kind of
religious education, will soon learn to say that we have nothing to
offer to God that is not already His own and that we find ourselves
failing to offer even that without keeping something back. But I am
talking of really discovering this: really finding out by experience
that it is true.
Now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God’s law
except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really
try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the
idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being
completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of
moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is
not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up
to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this.
I can’t.” Do not, I implore you, start asking yourselves, “Have I
reached that moment?” Do not sit down and start watching your own mind
to see if it is coming along. That puts a man quite on the wrong track.
When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not
know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to
himself, “Hullo! I’m growing up.” It is often only when he looks back
that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call
“growing up.” You can see it even in simple matters. A man who starts
anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very likely to
remain wide awake. As well, the thing I am talking of now may not happen
to every one in a sudden flash—as it did to St. Paul or Bunyan: it may
be so gradual that no one could ever point to a particular hour or even
a particular year. And what matters is the nature of the change in
itself, not how we feel while it is happening. It is the change from
being confident about our own efforts to the state in which we despair
of doing anything for ourselves and leave it to God.
I know the words “leave it to God” can be misunderstood, but they must
stay for the moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is
that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow
share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His
birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like
Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian
language, He will share His “sonship” with us, will make us, like
Himself, “Sons of God”: in Book III I shall attempt to analyse the
meaning of those words a little further. If you like to put it that way,
Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for
nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that
very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of
recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing. What we should
have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our bad
ones. Again, in a sense, you may say that no temptation is ever overcome
until we stop trying to overcome it—throw up the sponge. But then you
could not “stop trying” in the right way and for the right reason until
you had tried your very hardest. And, in yet another sense, handing
everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop
trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says.
There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not
take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it
must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a
less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but
because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as
a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain
way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.
Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian
home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to
speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking
which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral
effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you
throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from
despair at that point: and out of that Faith in Him good actions must
inevitably come. There are two parodies of the truth which different
sets of Christians have, in the past, been accused by other Christians
of believing: perhaps they may make the truth clearer. One set were
accused of saying, “Good actions are all that matters. The best good
action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving money. The best
thing to give money to is the Church. So hand us over £10,000 and we
will see you through.” The answer to that nonsense, of course, would be
that good actions done for that motive, done with the idea that Heaven
can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only commercial
speculations. The other set were accused of saying, “Faith is all that
matters. Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn’t matter what you do.
Sin away, my lad, and have a good time and Christ will see that it makes
no difference in the end.” The answer to that nonsense is that, if what
you call your “faith” in Christ does not involve taking the slightest
notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all—not faith or trust
in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.
The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things
together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, “Work out your
own salvation with fear and trembling”—which looks as if everything
depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, “For
it is God who worketh in you”—which looks as if God did everything and
we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in
Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now
trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight compartments,
what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working
together. And, of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men
working together, so that you could say, “He did this bit and I did
that.” But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that. He is
inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what,
I do not think human language could properly express it. In the attempt
to express it different Churches say different things. But you will find
that even those who insist most strongly on the importance of good
actions tell you you need Faith; and even those who insist most strongly
on Faith tell you to do good actions. At any rate that is as far as I
can go.
I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though
Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties
and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that,
into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not
talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is
filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with
light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything.
They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source
from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes
over the rim of our world. No one’s eyes can see very far beyond that:
lots of people’s eyes can see further than mine.
BOOK IV
BEYOND PERSONALITY: or FIRST STEPS IN THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY
1
MAKING AND BEGETTING
Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in
this last book. They all say “the ordinary reader does not want
Theology; give him plain practical religion.” I have rejected their
advice. I do not think the ordinary reader is such a fool. Theology
means “the science of God,” and I think any man who wants to think about
God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about
Him which are available. You are not children: why should you be treated
like children?
In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I
remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old,
hard-bitten officer got up and said, “I’ve no use for all that stuff.
But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt
Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And
that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas
about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and
pedantic and unreal!”
Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had
a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that
experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from
something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has
once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a
map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to
something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper.
But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but
there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place,
it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by
sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of
experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only,
while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those
different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go
anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content
with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking
at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if
you want to get to America.
Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the
Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting
than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not
God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the
experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with
God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you
and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very
confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the
map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been
real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads
nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a
vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so
attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from
the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic
that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the
presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by
looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you
go to sea without a map.
In other words, Theology is practical: especially now. In the old days,
when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to
get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now.
Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do
not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about
God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones—bad, muddled,
out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are
trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real
Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular
religion of modern England is retrogression—like believing the earth is
flat.
For when you get down to it, is not the popular idea of Christianity
simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if
only we took His advice we might be able to establish a better social
order and avoid another war? Now, mind you, that is quite true. But it
tells you much less than the whole truth about Christianity and it has
no practical importance at all.
It is quite true that if we took Christ’s advice we should soon be
living in a happier world. You need not even go as far as Christ. If we
did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a
great deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the
advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we
more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because He is the
best moral teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall
follow Him. If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we
are going to take the most advanced one? If Christianity only means one
more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There
has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit
more makes no difference.
But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, you find that
they are talking about something quite different from this popular
religion. They say that Christ is the Son of God (whatever that means).
They say that those who give Him their confidence can also become Sons
of God (whatever that means). They say that His death saved us from our
sins (whatever that means).
There is no good complaining that these statements are difficult.
Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about
something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think
the claim false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to
be difficult—at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same
reason.
Now the point in Christianity which gives us the greatest shock is the
statement that by attaching ourselves to Christ, we can “become Sons of
God.” One asks “Aren’t we Sons of God already? Surely the fatherhood of
God is one of the main Christian ideas?” Well, in a certain sense, no
doubt we are sons of God already. I mean, God has brought us into
existence and loves us and looks after us, and in that way is like a
father. But when the Bible talks of our “becoming” Sons of God,
obviously it must mean something different. And that brings us up
against the very centre of Theology.
One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God “begotten, not
created”; and it adds “begotten by his Father before all worlds.” Will
you please get it quite clear that this has nothing to do with the fact
that when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a
virgin? We are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We are thinking
about something that happened before Nature was created at all, before
time began. “Before all worlds” Christ is begotten, not created. What
does it mean?
We don’t use the words _begetting_ or _begotten_ much in modern English,
but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the
father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you
beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets
human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs
which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a
different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a
dam, a man makes a wireless set—or he may make something more like
himself than a wireless set: say, a statue. If he is a clever enough
carver he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of
course, it is not a real man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe
or think. It is not alive.
Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just
as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man
makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that
Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things
of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.
A statue has the shape of a man but it is not alive. In the same way,
man has (in a sense I am going to explain) the “shape” or likeness of
God, but he has not got the kind of life God has. Let us take the first
point (man’s resemblance to God) first. Everything God has made has some
likeness to Himself. Space is like Him in its hugeness: not that the
greatness of space is the same kind of greatness as God’s, but it is a
sort of symbol of it, or a translation of it into non-spiritual terms.
Matter is like God in having energy: though, again, of course, physical
energy is a different kind of thing from the power of God. The vegetable
world is like Him because it is alive, and He is the “living God.” But
life, in this biological sense, is not the same as the life there is in
God: it is only a kind of symbol or shadow of it. When we come on to the
animals, we find other kinds of resemblance in addition to biological
life. The intense activity and fertility of the insects, for example, is
a first dim resemblance to the unceasing activity and the creativeness
of God. In the higher mammals we get the beginnings of instinctive
affection. That is not the same thing as the love that exists in God:
but it is like it—rather in the way that a picture drawn on a flat piece
of paper can nevertheless be “like” a landscape. When we come to man,
the highest of the animals, we get the completest resemblance to God
which we know of. (There may be creatures in other worlds who are more
like God than man is, but we do not know about them.) Man not only
lives, but loves and reasons: biological life reaches its highest known
level in him.
But what man, in his natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual
life—the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. We use
the same word _life_ for both: but if you thought that both must
therefore be the same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that
the “greatness” of space and the “greatness” of God were the same sort
of greatness. In reality, the difference between Biological life and
Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct
names. The Biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and which
(like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay
so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the
form of air, water, food, etc., is _Bios_. The Spiritual life which is
in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is
_Zoe_. _Bios_ has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance
to _Zoe_: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and
a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having _Bios_ to
having _Zoe_ would have gone through as big a change as a statue which
changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.
And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great
sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round
the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
2
THE THREE-PERSONAL GOD
The last chapter was about the difference between begetting and making.
A man begets a child, but he only makes a statue. God begets Christ but
He only makes men. But by saying that, I have illustrated only one point
about God, namely, that what God the Father begets is God, something of
the same kind as Himself. In that way it is like a human father
begetting a human son. But not quite like it. So I must try to explain a
little more.
A good many people nowadays say, “I believe in a God, but not in a
personal God.” They feel that the mysterious something which is behind
all other things must be more than a person. Now the Christians quite
agree. But the Christians are the only people who offer any idea of what
a being that is beyond personality could be like. All the other people,
though they say that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as
something impersonal: that is, as something less than personal. If you
are looking for something super-personal, something more than a person,
then it is not a question of choosing between the Christian idea and the
other ideas. The Christian idea is the only one on the market.
Again, some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several
lives, human souls will be “absorbed” into God. But when they try to
explain what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed
into God as one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is
like a drop of water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the
end of the drop. If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is
the same as ceasing to exist. It is only the Christians who have any
idea of how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain
themselves—in fact, be very much more themselves than they were before.
I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we
exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what
that life is will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask
you to follow rather carefully.
You know that in space you can move in three ways—to left or right,
backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of
these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three
Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you
could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a
figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines.
Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build
what we call a solid body: say, a cube—a thing like a dice or a lump of
sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.
Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line.
In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines
make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but
many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more
real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things
you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in
new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler
levels.
Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The
human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one
person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just
as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one
figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine
level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined
in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In
God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons
while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining
one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as,
if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we
could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint
notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our
lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something
super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could
never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels
one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with
all the things we know already.
You may ask, “If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the
good of talking about Him?” Well, there isn’t any good talking about
Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that
three-personal life, and that may begin any time—tonight, if you like.
What I mean is this. An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his
prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a
Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God,
so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge
of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God—that Christ is standing
beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is
happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying
to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the
motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being
pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the
three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little
bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being
caught up into the higher kind of life—what I called _Zoe_ or spiritual
life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining
himself.
And that is how Theology started. People already knew about God in a
vague way. Then came a man who claimed to be God; and yet He was not the
sort of man you could dismiss as a lunatic. He made them believe Him.
They met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then, after they
had been formed into a little society or community, they found God
somehow inside them as well: directing them, making them able to do
things they could not do before. And when they worked it all out they
found they had arrived at the Christian definition of the three-personal
God.
This definition is not something we have made up; Theology is, in a
sense, an experimental science. It is the simple religions that are the
made-up ones. When I say it is an experimental science “in a sense,” I
mean that it is like the other experimental sciences in some ways, but
not in all. If you are a geologist studying rocks, you have to go and
find the rocks. They will not come to you, and if you go to them they
cannot run away. The initiative lies all on your side. They cannot
either help or hinder. But suppose you are a zoologist and want to take
photos of wild animals in their native haunts. That is a bit different
from studying rocks. The wild animals will not come to you: but they can
run away from you. Unless you keep very quiet, they will. There is
beginning to be a tiny little trace of initiative on their side.
Now a stage higher; suppose you want to get to know a human person. If
he is determined not to let you, you will not get to know him. You have
to win his confidence. In this case the initiative is equally divided—it
takes two to make a friendship.
When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He
does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him.
And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to
others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for
Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the
wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot
be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.
You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the
instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like
microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is
your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his
glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty
telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they
have been looking at God through a dirty lens.
God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means
not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united
together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him
to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like
players in one band, or organs in one body.
Consequently, the one really adequate instrument for learning about God
is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian
brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this
science—the laboratory outfit. That is why all these people who turn up
every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own as a
substitute for the Christian tradition are really wasting time. Like a
man who has no instrument but an old pair of field glasses setting out
to put all the real astronomers right. He may be a clever chap—he may be
cleverer than some of the real astronomers, but he is not giving himself
a chance. And two years later everyone has forgotten all about him, but
the real science is still going on.
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make
it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people
who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of
course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
3
TIME AND BEYOND TIME
It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never “skip.”
All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they
find is going to be no use to them. In this chapter I am going to talk
about something which may be helpful to some readers, but which may seem
to others merely an unnecessary complication. If you are one of the
second sort of readers, then I advise you not to bother about this
chapter at all but to turn on to the next.
In the last chapter I had to touch on the subject of prayer, and while
that is still fresh in your mind and my own, I should like to deal with
a difficulty that some people find about the whole idea of prayer. A man
put it to me by saying “I can believe in God all right, but what I
cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million
human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.” And I have
found that quite a lot of people feel this.
Now, the first thing to notice is that the whole sting of it comes in
the words _at the same moment_. Most of us can imagine God attending to
any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an
endless time to do it in. So what is really at the back of this
difficulty is the idea of God having to fit too many things into one
moment of time.
Well that is of course what happens to us. Our life comes to us moment
by moment. One moment disappears before the next comes along: and there
is room for very little in each. That is what Time is like. And of
course you and I tend to take it for granted that this Time series—this
arrangement of past, present and future—is not simply the way life comes
to us but the way all things really exist. We tend to assume that the
whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future
just as we do. But many learned men do not agree with that. It was the
Theologians who first started the idea that some things are not in Time
at all: later the Philosophers took it over: and now some of the
scientists are doing the same.
Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of
moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at
ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little
snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty—and every other moment from
the beginning of the world—is always the Present for Him. If you like to
put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split
second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.
That is difficult, I know. Let me try to give something, not the same,
but a bit like it. Suppose I am writing a novel. I write “Mary laid down
her work; next moment came a knock at the door!” For Mary who has to
live in the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between
putting down the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary’s maker,
do not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first
half of that sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours
and think steadily about Mary. I could think about Mary as if she were
the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the
hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary’s time (the time
inside the story) at all.
This is not a perfect illustration, of course. But it may give just a
glimpse of what I believe to be the truth. God is not hurried along in
the Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried
along in the imaginary time of his own novel. He has infinite attention
to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the
mass. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He
had ever created. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as
much as if you had been the only man in the world.
The way in which my illustration breaks down is this. In it the author
gets out of one Time-series (that of the novel) only by going into
another Time-series (the real one). But God, I believe, does not live in
a Time-series at all. His life is not dribbled out moment by moment like
ours: with Him it is, so to speak, still 1920 and already 1960. For His
life is Himself.
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel,
then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.
We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind
before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God,
from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it
all.
The idea is worth trying to grasp because it removes some apparent
difficulties in Christianity. Before I became a Christian one of my
objections was as follows. The Christians said that the eternal God who
is everywhere and keeps the whole universe going, once became a human
being. Well then, said I, how did the whole universe keep going while He
was a baby, or while He was asleep? How could He at the same time be God
who knows everything and also a man asking his disciples “Who touched
me?” You will notice that the sting lay in the _time_ words: “_While_ He
was a baby”—“How could He _at the same time_?” In other words I was
assuming that Christ’s life as God was in time, and that His life as the
man Jesus in Palestine was a shorter period taken out of that time—just
as my service in the army was a shorter period taken out of my total
life. And that is how most of us perhaps tend to think about it. We
picture God living through a period when His human life was still in the
future: then coming to a period when it was present: then going on to a
period when He could look back on it as something in the past. But
probably these ideas correspond to nothing in the actual facts. You
cannot fit Christ’s earthly life in Palestine into any time-relations
with His life as God beyond all space and time. It is really, I suggest,
a timeless truth about God that human nature, and the human experience
of weakness and sleep and ignorance, are somehow included in His whole
divine life. This human life in God is from our point of view a
particular period in the history of our world (from the year A.D. one
till the Crucifixion). We therefore imagine it is also a period in the
history of God’s own existence. But God has no history. He is too
completely and utterly real to have one. For, of course, to have a
history means losing part of your reality (because it has already
slipped away into the past) and not yet having another part (because it
is still in the future): in fact having nothing but the tiny little
present, which has gone before you can speak about it. God forbid we
should think God was like that. Even we may hope not to be always
rationed in that way.
Another difficulty we get if we believe God to be in time is this.
Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and
I are going to do tomorrow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so,
how can I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again, the difficulty
comes from thinking that God is progressing along the Time-line like us:
the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot. Well, if
that were true, if God _foresaw_ our acts, it would be very hard to
understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is
outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call “tomorrow”
is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call “today.” All the
days are “Now” for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday;
He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday,
He has not. He does not “foresee” you doing things tomorrow; He simply
sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you,
it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were
any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your
tomorrow’s actions in just the same way—because He is already in
tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your
action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done
it is already “Now” for Him.
This idea has helped me a good deal. If it does not help you, leave it
alone. It is a “Christian idea” in the sense that great and wise
Christians have held it and there is nothing in it contrary to
Christianity. But it is not in the Bible or any of the creeds. You can
be a perfectly good Christian without accepting it, or indeed without
thinking of the matter at all.
4
GOOD INFECTION
I begin this chapter by asking you to get a certain picture clear in
your minds. Imagine two books lying on a table one on top of the other.
Obviously the bottom book is keeping the other one up—supporting it. It
is because of the underneath book that the top one is resting, say, two
inches from the surface of the table instead of touching the table. Let
us call the underneath book A and the top one B. The position of A is
causing the position of B. That is clear? Now let us imagine—it could
not really happen, of course, but it will do for an illustration—let us
imagine that both books have been in that position for ever and ever. In
that case B’s position would always have been resulting from A’s
position. But all the same, A’s position would not have existed before
B’s position. In other words the result does not come _after_ the cause.
Of course, results usually do: you eat the cucumber first and have the
indigestion afterwards. But it is not so with all causes, and results.
You will see in a moment why I think this important.
I said a few pages back that God is a Being which contains three Persons
while remaining one Being, just as a cube contains six squares while
remaining one body. But as soon as I begin trying to explain how these
Persons are connected I have to use words which make it sound as if one
of them was there before the others. The First Person is called the
Father and the Second the Son. We say that the First begets or produces
the second; we call it _begetting_, not _making_, because what He
produces is of the same kind as Himself. In that way the word Father is
the only word to use. But unfortunately it suggests that He is there
first—just as a human father exists before his son. But that is not so.
There is no before and after about it. And that is why I think it
important to make clear how one thing can be the source, or cause, or
origin, of another without being there before it. The Son exists because
the Father exists: but there never was a time before the Father produced
the Son.
Perhaps the best way to think of it is this. I asked you just now to
imagine those two books, and probably most of you did. That is, you made
an act of imagination and as a result you had a mental picture. Quite
obviously your act of imagining was the cause and the mental picture the
result. But that does not mean that you first did the imagining and then
got the picture. The moment you did it, the picture was there. Your will
was keeping the picture before you all the time. Yet that act of will
and the picture began at exactly the same moment and ended at the same
moment. If there were a Being who had always existed and had always been
imagining one thing, his act would always have been producing a mental
picture; but the picture would be just as eternal as the act.
In the same way we must think of the Son always, so to speak, streaming
forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or
thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father—what the
Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it.
But have you noticed what is happening? All these pictures of light or
heat are making it sound as if the Father and Son were two things
instead of two Persons. So that after all, the New Testament picture of
a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we
try to substitute for it. That is what always happens when you go away
from the words of the Bible. It is quite right to go away from them for
a moment in order to make some special point clear. But you must always
go back. Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we
know how to describe Him. He knows that Father and Son is more like the
relation between the First and Second Persons than anything else we can
think of. Much the most important thing to know is that it is a relation
of love. The Father delights in His Son; the Son looks up to His Father.
Before going on, notice the practical importance of this. All sorts of
people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that “God is love.”
But they seem not to notice that the words “God is love” have no real
meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that
one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then
before the world was made, He was not love. Of course, what these people
mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different:
they really mean “Love is God.” They really mean that our feelings of
love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they
produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but
that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the
statement “God is love.” They believe that the living, dynamic activity
of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything
else.
And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between
Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a
static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a
life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me
irreverent, a kind of dance. The union between the Father and the Son is
such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person. I
know this is almost inconceivable, but look at it thus. You know that
among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a
trade union, people talk about the “spirit” of that family, or club, or
trade union. They talk about its “spirit” because the individual
members, when they are together, do really develop particular ways of
talking and behaving which they would not have if they were apart.[4] It
is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course,
it is not a real person: it is only rather like a person. But that is
just one of the differences between God and us. What grows out of the
joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third
of the three Persons who are God.
This third Person is called, in technical language, the Holy Ghost or
the “spirit” of God. Do not be worried or surprised if you find it (or
Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two. I
think there is a reason why that must be so. In the Christian life you
are not usually looking _at_ Him: He is always acting through you. If
you think of the Father as something “out there,” in front of you, and
of the Son as someone standing at your side, helping you to pray, trying
to turn you into another son, then you have to think of the third Person
as something inside you, or behind you. Perhaps some people might find
it easier to begin with the third Person and work backwards. God is
love, and that love works through men—especially through the whole
community of Christians. But this spirit of love is, from all eternity,
a love going on between the Father and the Son.
And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in
the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal
life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way
round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in
that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were
made. Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of
infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you
want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power,
peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that
has them. They are not a sort of prizes which God could, if He chose,
just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty
spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the
spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is
united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated
from God, what can he do but wither and die?
But how is he to be united to God? How is it possible for us to be taken
into the three-Personal life?
You remember what I said in Chapter II about _begetting_ and _making_.
We are not begotten by God, we are only made by Him: in our natural
state we are not sons of God, only (so to speak) statues. We have not
got _Zoe_ or spiritual life: only _Bios_ or biological life which is
presently going to run down and die. Now the whole offer which
Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way,
come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing
a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always
will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life
we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and
the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man
in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call
“good infection.” Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The
whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
5
THE OBSTINATE TOY SOLDIERS
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God. We do
not know—anyway, I do not know—how things would have worked if the human
race had never rebelled against God and joined the enemy. Perhaps every
man would have been “in Christ,” would have shared the life of the Son
of God, from the moment he was born. Perhaps the _Bios_ or natural life
would have been drawn up into the _Zoe_, the uncreated life, at once and
as a matter of course. But that is guesswork. You and I are concerned
with the way things work now.
And the present state of things is this. The two kinds of life are now
not only different (they would always have been that) but actually
opposed. The natural life in each of us is something self-centred,
something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of
other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to
be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or
higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of
the light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been
brought up to be dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite
right. It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its
self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to
fight tooth and nail to avoid that.
Did you ever think, when you were a child, what fun it would be if your
toys could come to life? Well suppose you could really have brought them
to life. Imagine turning a tin soldier into a real little man. It would
involve turning the tin into flesh. And suppose the tin soldier did not
like it. He is not interested in flesh; all he sees is that the tin is
being spoilt. He thinks you are killing him. He will do everything he
can to prevent you. He will not be made into a man if he can help it.
What you would have done about that tin soldier I do not know. But what
God did about us was this. The Second Person in God, the Son, became
human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man—a real man of a
particular height, with hair of a particular colour, speaking a
particular language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who
knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a
man but (before that) a baby, and before that a _fœtus_ inside a Woman’s
body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to
become a slug or a crab.
The result of this was that you now had one man who really was what all
men were intended to be: one man in whom the created life, derived from
His Mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into
the begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully
into the divine Son. Thus in one instance humanity had, so to speak,
arrived: had passed into the life of Christ. And because the whole
difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense,
“killed,” He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His
human desires at every turn—poverty, misunderstanding from His own
family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and
manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after
being thus killed—killed every day in a sense—the human creature in Him,
because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in
Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point. For the
first time we saw a real man. One tin soldier—real tin, just like the
rest—had come fully and splendidly alive.
And here, of course, we come to the point where my illustration about
the tin soldier breaks down. In the case of real toy soldiers or
statues, if one came to life, it would obviously make no difference to
the rest. They are all separate. But human beings are not. They look
separate because you see them walking about separately. But then, we are
so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the
past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when
every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father
as well: and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see
humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look like a
lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one single
growing thing—rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual
would appear connected with every other. And not only that. Individuals
are not really separate from God any more than from one another. Every
man, woman, and child all over the world is feeling and breathing at
this moment only because God, so to speak, is “keeping him going.”
Consequently, when Christ becomes man it is not really as if you could
become one particular tin soldier. It is as if something which is always
affecting the whole human mass begins, at one point, to affect that
whole human mass in a new way. From that point the effect spreads
through all mankind. It makes a difference to people who lived before
Christ as well as to people who lived after Him. It makes a difference
to people who have never heard of Him. It is like dropping into a glass
of water one drop of something which gives a new taste or a new colour
to the whole lot. But, of course, none of these illustrations really
works perfectly. In the long run God is no one but Himself and what He
does is like nothing else. You could hardly expect it to be.
What, then, is the difference which He has made to the whole human mass?
It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being
turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from
the temporary biological life into timeless “spiritual” life, has been
done for us. Humanity is already “saved” in principle. We individuals
have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work—the bit we
could not have done for ourselves—has been done for us. We have not got
to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has
already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves
open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of
being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us. Remember
what I said about “good infection.” One of our own race has this new
life: if we get close to Him we shall catch it from Him.
Of course, you can express this in all sorts of different ways. You can
say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has
forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done.
You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say
that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. If any of them do not
appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does.
And, whatever you do, do not start quarrelling with other people because
they use a different formula from yours.
6
TWO NOTES
In order to avoid misunderstanding I here add notes on two points
arising out of the last chapter.
(1) One sensible critic wrote asking me why, if God wanted sons instead
of “toy soldiers,” He did not _beget_ many sons at the outset instead of
first _making_ toy soldiers and then bringing them to life by such a
difficult and painful process. One part of the answer to this question
is fairly easy: the other part is probably beyond all human knowledge.
The easy part is this. The process of being turned from a creature into
a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not
turned away from God centuries ago. They were able to do this because He
gave them free will: He gave them free will because a world of mere
automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness.
The difficult part is this. All Christians are agreed that there is, in
the full and original sense, only one “Son of God.” If we insist on
asking “But could there have been many?” we find ourselves in very deep
water. Have the words “Could have been” any sense at all when applied to
God? You can say that one particular finite thing “could have been”
different from what it is, because it would have been different if
something else had been different, and the something else would have
been different if some third thing had been different, and so on. (The
letters on this page would have been red if the printer had used red
ink, and he would have used red ink if he had been instructed to, and so
on.) But when you are talking about God—i.e. about the rock bottom,
irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend—it is nonsensical to
ask if It could have been otherwise. It is what It is, and there is an
end of the matter. But quite apart from this, I find a difficulty about
the very idea of the Father begetting many sons from all eternity. In
order to be many they would have to be somehow different from one
another. Two pennies have the same shape. How are they two? By occupying
different places and containing different atoms. In other words, to
think of them as different, we have had to bring in space and matter; in
fact we have had to bring in “Nature” or the created universe. I can
understand the distinction between the Father and the Son without
bringing in space or matter, because the one begets and the other is
begotten. The Father’s relation to the Son is not the same as the Son’s
relation to the Father. But if there were several sons they would all be
related to one another and to the Father in the same way. How would they
differ from one another? One does not notice the difficulty at first, of
course. One thinks one can form the idea of several “sons.” But when I
think closely, I find that the idea seemed possible only because I was
vaguely imagining them as human forms standing about together in some
kind of space. In other words, though I pretended to be thinking about
something that exists before any universe was made, I was really
smuggling in the picture of a universe and putting that something
_inside_ it. When I stop doing that and still try to think of the Father
begetting many sons “before all worlds” I find I am not really thinking
of anything. The idea fades away into mere words. (Was Nature—space and
time and matter—created precisely in order to make many-ness possible?
Is there perhaps no other way of getting many eternal spirits except by
first making many natural creatures, in a universe, and then
spiritualising them? But of course all this is guesswork.)
(2) The idea that the whole human race is, in a sense, one thing—one
huge organism, like a tree—must not be confused with the idea that
individual differences do not matter or that real people, Tom and Nobby
and Kate, are somehow less important than collective things like
classes, races, and so forth. Indeed the two ideas are opposites. Things
which are parts of a single organism may be very different from one
another: things which are not, may be very alike. Six pennies are quite
separate and very alike: my nose and my lungs are very different but
they are only alive at all because they are parts of my body and share
its common life. Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere
members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body—different
from one another and each contributing what no other could. When you
find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your
neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God
probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs,
intended to do different things. On the other hand, when you are tempted
not to bother about someone else’s troubles because they are “no
business of yours,” remember that though he is different from you he is
part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the
same organism as yourself you will become an Individualist. If you
forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress
differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian.
But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.
I feel a strong desire to tell you—and I expect you feel a strong desire
to tell me—which of these two errors is the worse. That is the devil
getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of
opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking
which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra
dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.
But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go
straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that
with either of them.
7
LET’S PRETEND
May I once again start by putting two pictures, or two stories rather,
into your minds? One is the story you have all read called _Beauty and
the Beast_. The girl, you remember, had to marry a monster for some
reason. And she did. She kissed it as if it were a man. And then, much
to her relief, it really turned into a man and all went well. The other
story is about someone who had to wear a mask; a mask which made him
look much nicer than he really was. He had to wear it for years. And
when he took it off he found his own face had grown to fit it. He was
now really beautiful. What had begun as disguise had become a reality. I
think both these stories may (in a fanciful way, of course) help to
illustrate what I have to say in this chapter. Up till now, I have been
trying to describe facts—what God is and what He has done. Now I want to
talk about practice—what do we do next? What difference does all this
theology make? It can start making a difference tonight. If you are
interested enough to have read thus far you are probably interested
enough to make a shot at saying your prayers: and, whatever else you
say, you will probably say the Lord’s Prayer.
Its very first words are _Our Father_. Do you now see what those words
mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the
place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are _dressing up as
Christ_. If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment
you realise what the words mean, you realise that you are not a son of
God. You are not a being like The Son of God, whose will and interests
are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centred
fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death.
So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous
cheek. But the odd thing is that He has ordered us to do it.
Why? What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even
on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There
is a bad kind, where the pretence is there instead of the real thing; as
when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping
you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the
real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you
ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a
friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you
actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be
really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get
a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That
is why children’s games are so important. They are always pretending to
be grown-ups—playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are
hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the pretence
of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest.
Now, the moment you realise “Here I am, dressing up as Christ,” it is
extremely likely that you will see at once some way in which at that
very moment the pretence could be made less of a pretence and more of a
reality. You will find several things going on in your mind which would
not be going on there if you were really a son of God. Well, stop them.
Or you may realise that, instead of saying your prayers, you ought to be
downstairs writing a letter, or helping your wife to wash-up. Well, go
and do it.
You see what is happening. The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man
(just like you) and God (just like His Father) is actually at your side
and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretence into a
reality. This is not merely a fancy way of saying that your conscience
is telling you what to do. If you simply ask your conscience, you get
one result: if you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get
a different one. There are lots of things which your conscience might
not call definitely wrong (specially things in your mind) but which you
will see at once you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to
be like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and
wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person. It is
more like painting a portrait than like obeying a set of rules. And the
odd thing is that while in one way it is much harder than keeping rules,
in another way it is far easier.
The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into
the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to
“inject” His kind of life and thought, His _Zoe_, into you; beginning to
turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like
it is the part that is still tin.
Some of you may feel that this is very unlike your own experience. You
may say “I’ve never had the sense of being helped by an invisible
Christ, but I often have been helped by other human beings.” That is
rather like the woman in the first war who said that if there were a
bread shortage it would not bother her house because they always ate
toast. If there is no bread there will be no toast. If there were no
help from Christ, there would be no help from other human beings. He
works on us in all sorts of ways: not only through what we think our
“religious life.” He works through Nature, through our own bodies,
through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time)
_anti_-Christian. When a young man who has been going to church in a
routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity
and stops going—provided he does it for honesty’s sake and not just to
annoy his parents—the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then
than it ever was before. But above all, He works on us through each
other.
Men are mirrors, or “carriers” of Christ to other men. Sometimes
unconscious carriers. This “good infection” can be carried by those who
have not got it themselves. People who were not Christians themselves
helped me to Christianity. But usually it is those who know Him that
bring Him to others. That is why the Church, the whole body of
Christians showing Him to one another, is so important. You might say
that when two Christians are following Christ together there is not
twice as much Christianity as when they are apart, but sixteen times as
much.
But do not forget this. At first it is natural for a baby to take its
mother’s milk without knowing its mother. It is equally natural for us
to see the man who helps us without seeing Christ behind him. But we
must not remain babies. We must go on to recognise the real Giver. It is
madness not to. Because, if we do not, we shall be relying on human
beings. And that is going to let us down. The best of them will make
mistakes; all of them will die. We must be thankful to all the people
who have helped us, we must honour them and love them. But never, never
pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and
wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with
sand; but do not try building a house on it.
And now we begin to see what it is that the New Testament is always
talking about. It talks about Christians “being born again”; it talks
about them “putting on Christ”; about Christ “being formed in us”; about
our coming to “have the mind of Christ.”
Put right out of your head the idea that these are only fancy ways of
saying that Christians are to read what Christ said and try to carry it
out—as a man may read what Plato or Marx said and try to carry it out.
They mean something much more than that. They mean that a real Person,
Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your
prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who
died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as
you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really
coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self
in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for
moments. Then for longer periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you
permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new little Christ, a
being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God;
which shares in His power, joy, knowledge and eternity. And soon we make
two other discoveries.
(1) We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our
sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about
what we are. This may sound rather difficult, so I will try to make it
clear from my own case. When I come to my evening prayers and try to
reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious
one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or
snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind
is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected: I was caught off
my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an
extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would
obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated. On the
other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the
best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before
the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in
a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But
the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from
hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make
me an ill-tempered man: it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.
The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and
noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.
Apparently the rats of resentment and vindictiveness are always there in
the cellar of my soul. Now that cellar is out of reach of my conscious
will. I can to some extent control my acts: I have no direct control
over my temperament. And if (as I said before) what we are matters even
more than what we do—if, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence
of what we are—then it follows that the change which I most need to
undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring
about. And this applies to my good actions too. How many of them were
done for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion, or a
desire to show off? How many from a sort of obstinacy or sense of
superiority which, in different circumstances, might equally have led to
some very bad act? But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new
motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that
everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only
by God. And that brings us to something which has been very misleading
in my language up to now.
(2) I have been talking as if it were we who did everything. In reality,
of course, it is God who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be
done to us. In a sense you might even say it is God who does the
pretending. The Three-Personal God, so to speak, sees before Him in fact
a self-centred, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says
“Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is
like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend
that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what
in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a
reality.” God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands
beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine
make-believe sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange
really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A
mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood
long before it really does. We treat our dogs as if they were “almost
human”: that is why they really become “almost human” in the end.
8
IS CHRISTIANITY HARD OR EASY?
In the previous chapter we were considering the Christian idea of
“putting on Christ,” or first “dressing up” as a son of God in order
that you may finally become a real son. What I want to make clear is
that this is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is
not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of
Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all. And I should like
to point out how it differs from ordinary ideas of “morality” and “being
good.”
The ordinary idea which we all have before we become Christians is this.
We take as starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and
interests. We then admit that something else—call it “morality” or
“decent behaviour,” or “the good of society”—has claims on this self:
claims which interfere with its own desires. What we mean by “being
good” is giving in to those claims. Some of the things the ordinary self
wanted to do turn out to be what we call “wrong”: well, we must give
them up. Other things, which the self did not want to do, turn out to be
what we call “right”: well, we shall have to do them. But we are hoping
all the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural
self will still have some chance, and some time, to get on with its own
life and do what it likes. In fact, we are very like an honest man
paying his taxes. He pays them all right, but he does hope that there
will be enough left over for him to live on. Because we are still taking
our natural self as the starting point.
As long as we are thinking that way, one or other of two results is
likely to follow. Either we give up trying to be good, or else we become
very unhappy indeed. For, make no mistake: if you are really going to
try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have
enough left over to live on. The more you obey your conscience, the more
your conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus
being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier
and angrier. In the end, you will either give up trying to be good, or
else become one of those people who, as they say, “live for others” but
always in a discontented, grumbling way—always wondering why the others
do not notice it more and always making a martyr of yourself. And once
you have become that you will be a far greater pest to anyone who has to
live with you than you would have been if you had remained frankly
selfish.
The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says “Give me
All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so
much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural
self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut
off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree
down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to
have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you
think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I
will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my
own will shall become yours.”
Both harder and easier than what we are all trying to do. You have
noticed, I expect, that Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian
way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your
Cross”—in other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in a
concentration camp. Next minute he says, “My yoke is easy and my burden
light.” He means both. And one can just see why both are true.
Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who
works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a
proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble
will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart
because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later,
when they are preparing for an exam., that lazy boy is doing hours and
hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands, and
positively enjoys, in a few minutes. Laziness means more work in the
long run. Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing,
there is often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is
also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you funk it, you will
find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is
also the most dangerous thing.
It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing,
is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to
Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead.
For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call “ourselves,” to
keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same
time be “good.” We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own
way—centred on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of
this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly
what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot
produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I
cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall
still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change
must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.
That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do
not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each
morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild
animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them
all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of
view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.
And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and
frettings; coming in out of the wind.
We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new
sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are
letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between
paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which
soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When he
said, “Be perfect,” He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the
full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all
hankering after is harder—in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for
an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to
learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And
you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We
must be hatched or go bad.
May I come back to what I said before? This is the whole of
Christianity. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled about
that. It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different
objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is
easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military,
political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler
than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the
ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife
chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a
pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own
garden—that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping
to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws,
parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste
of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw
men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing
that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible
itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.
It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created
for any other purpose. It says in the Bible that the whole universe was
made for Christ and that everything is to be gathered together in Him. I
do not suppose any of us can understand how this will happen as regards
the whole universe. We do not know what (if anything) lives in the parts
of it that are millions of miles away from this Earth. Even on this
Earth we do not know how it applies to things other than men. After all,
that is what you would expect. We have been shown the plan only in so
far as it concerns ourselves.
I sometimes like to imagine that I can just see how it might apply to
other things. I think I can see how the higher animals are in a sense
drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more
nearly human than they would otherwise be. I can even see a sense in
which the dead things and plants are drawn into Man as he studies them
and uses and appreciates them. And if there were intelligent creatures
in other worlds they might do the same with their worlds. It might be
that when intelligent creatures entered into Christ they would, in that
way, bring all the other things in along with them. But I do not know:
it is only a guess.
What we have been told is how we men can be drawn into Christ—can become
part of that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe
wants to offer to His Father—that present which is Himself and therefore
us in Him. It is the only thing we were made for. And there are strange,
exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many
other things in Nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be
over: it will be morning.
9
COUNTING THE COST
I find a good many people have been bothered by what I said in the
previous chapter about Our Lord’s words, “Be ye perfect.” Some people
seem to think this means “Unless you are perfect, I will not help you”;
and as we cannot be perfect, then, if He meant that, our position is
hopeless. But I do not think He did mean that. I think He meant “The
only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something
less: but I will give you nothing less.”
Let me explain. When I was a child I often had toothache, and I knew
that if I went to my mother she would give me something which would
deaden the pain for that night and let me get to sleep. But I did not go
to my mother—at least, not till the pain became very bad. And the reason
I did not go was this. I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin;
but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to
the dentist next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her
without getting something more, which I did not want. I wanted immediate
relief from pain: but I could not get it without having my teeth set
permanently right. And I knew those dentists; I knew they started
fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to
ache. They would not let sleeping dogs lie; if you gave them an inch
they took an ell.
Now, if I may put it that way, Our Lord is like the dentists. If you
give Him an inch, He will take an ell. Dozens of people go to Him to be
cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of (like
masturbation or physical cowardice) or which is obviously spoiling daily
life (like bad temper or drunkenness). Well, He will cure it all right:
but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you
call Him in, He will give you the full treatment.
That is why He warned people to “count the cost” before becoming
Christians. “Make no mistake,” He says, “if you let me, I will make you
perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are
in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if
you choose, you can push Me away. But if you do not push Me away,
understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering
it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable
purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will
never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect—until my
Father can say without reservation that He is well pleased with you, as
He said He was well pleased with me. This I can do and will do. But I
will not do anything less.”
And yet—this is the other and equally important side of it—this Helper
who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute
perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling
effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty. As a great Christian
writer (George MacDonald) pointed out, every father is pleased at the
baby’s first attempt to walk: no father would be satisfied with anything
less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son. In the same way,
he said, “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”
The practical upshot is this. On the one hand, God’s demand for
perfection need not discourage you in the least in your present attempts
to be good, or even in your present failures. Each time you fall He will
pick you up again. And He knows perfectly well that your own efforts are
never going to bring you anywhere near perfection. On the other hand,
you must realise from the outset that the goal towards which He is
beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole
universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that
goal. That is what you are in for. And it is very important to realise
that. If we do not, then we are very likely to start pulling back and
resisting Him after a certain point. I think that many of us, when
Christ has enabled us to overcome one or two sins that were an obvious
nuisance, are inclined to feel (though we do not put it into words) that
we are now good enough. He has done all we wanted Him to do, and we
should be obliged if He would now leave us alone. As we say “I never
expected to be a saint, I only wanted to be a decent ordinary chap.” And
we imagine when we say this that we are being humble.
But this is the fatal mistake. Of course we never wanted, and never
asked, to be made into the sort of creatures He is going to make us
into. But the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what
He intended us to be when He made us. He is the inventor, we are only
the machine. He is the painter, we are only the picture. How should we
know what He means us to be like? You see, He has already made us
something very different from what we were. Long ago, before we were
born, when we were inside our mother’s bodies, we passed through various
stages. We were once rather like vegetables, and once rather like fish;
it was only at a later stage that we became like human babies. And if we
had been conscious at those earlier stages, I daresay we should have
been quite contented to stay as vegetables or fish—should not have
wanted to be made into babies. But all the time He knew His plan for us
and was determined to carry it out. Something the same is now happening
at a higher level. We may be content to remain what we call “ordinary
people”: but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To
shrink back from that plan is not humility; it is laziness and
cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania; it is
obedience.
Here is another way of putting the two sides of the truth. On the one
hand we must never imagine that our own unaided efforts can be relied on
to carry us even through the next twenty-four hours as “decent” people.
If He does not support us, not one of us is safe from some gross sin. On
the other hand, no possible degree of holiness or heroism which has ever
been recorded of the greatest saints is beyond what He is determined to
produce in every one of us in the end. The job will not be completed in
this life: but He means to get us as far as possible before death.
That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When
a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the
sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected), he often feels
that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When
troubles come along—illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of
temptation—he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been
necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why
now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting
him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more
patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems
to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the
slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.
I find I must borrow yet another parable from George MacDonald. Imagine
yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At
first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the
drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that
those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he
starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does
not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is
that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought
of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there,
running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be
made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He
intends to come and live in it Himself.
The command _Be ye perfect_ is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command
to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can
obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were “gods” and He is
going to make good His words. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if
we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or
goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through
with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a
bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of
course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and
goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that
is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.
10
NICE PEOPLE OR NEW MEN
He meant what He said. Those who put themselves in His hands will become
perfect, as He is perfect—perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, and
immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is
an important part of the treatment. How far the change will have gone
before death in any particular Christian is uncertain.
I think this is the right moment to consider a question which is often
asked: If Christianity is true why are not all Christians obviously
nicer than all non-Christians? What lies behind that question is partly
something very reasonable and partly something that is not reasonable at
all. The reasonable part is this. If conversion to Christianity makes no
improvement in a man’s outward actions—if he continues to be just as
snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before—then I
think we must suspect that his “conversion” was largely imaginary; and
after one’s original conversion, every time one thinks one has made an
advance, that is the test to apply. Fine feelings, new insights, greater
interest in “religion” mean nothing unless they make our actual
behaviour better; just as in an illness “feeling better” is not much
good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up.
In that sense the outer world is quite right to judge Christianity by
its results. Christ told us to judge by results. A tree is known by its
fruit; or, as we say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When we
Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making
Christianity unbelievable to the outside world. The wartime posters told
us that Careless Talk costs Lives. It is equally true that Careless
Lives cost Talk. Our careless lives set the outer world talking; and we
give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of
Christianity itself.
But there is another way of demanding results in which the outer world
may be quite illogical. They may demand not merely that each man’s life
should improve if he becomes a Christian: they may also demand before
they believe in Christianity that they should see the whole world neatly
divided into two camps—Christian and non-Christian—and that all the
people in the first camp at any given moment should be obviously nicer
than all the people in the second. This is unreasonable on several
grounds.
(1) In the first place the situation in the actual world is much more
complicated than that. The world does not consist of 100 per cent.
Christians and 100 per cent. non-Christians. There are people (a great
many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call
themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other
people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call
themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian
doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they
are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There
are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret
influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in
agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without
knowing it. For example, a Buddhist of good will may be led to
concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to
leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the
Buddhist teaching on certain other points. Many of the good Pagans long
before Christ’s birth may have been in this position. And always, of
course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and
have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together.
Consequently, it is not much use trying to make judgments about
Christians and non-Christians in the mass. It is some use comparing cats
and dogs, or even men and women, in the mass, because there one knows
definitely which is which. Also, an animal does not turn (either slowly
or suddenly) from a dog into a cat. But when we are comparing Christians
in general with non-Christians in general, we are usually not thinking
about real people whom we know at all, but only about two vague ideas
which we have got from novels and newspapers. If you want to compare the
bad Christian and the good Atheist, you must think about two real
specimens whom you have actually met. Unless we come down to brass tacks
in that way, we shall only be wasting time.
(2) Suppose we have come down to brass tacks and are now talking not
about an imaginary Christian and an imaginary non-Christian, but about
two real people in our own neighbourhood. Even then we must be careful
to ask the right question. If Christianity is true then it ought to
follow (_a_) That any Christian will be nicer than the same person would
be if he were not a Christian, (_b_) That any man who becomes a
Christian will be nicer than he was before. Just in the same way, if the
advertisements of Whitesmile’s toothpaste are true it ought to follow
(_a_) That anyone who uses it will have better teeth than the same
person would have if he did not use it. (_b_) That if anyone begins to
use it his teeth will improve. But to point out that I, who use
Whitesmile’s (and also have inherited bad teeth from both my parents)
have not got as fine a set as some healthy young negro who never used
any toothpaste at all, does not, by itself, prove that the
advertisements are untrue. Christian Miss Bates may have an unkinder
tongue than unbelieving Dick Firkin. That, by itself, does not tell us
whether Christianity works. The question is what Miss Bates’s tongue
would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like
if he became one. Miss Bates and Dick, as a result of natural causes and
early upbringing, have certain temperaments: Christianity professes to
put both temperaments under new management if they will allow it to do
so. What you have a right to ask is whether that management, if allowed
to take over, improves the concern. Everyone knows that what is being
managed in Dick Firkin’s case is much “nicer” than what is being managed
in Miss Bates’s. That is not the point. To judge the management of a
factory, you must, consider not only the output but the plant.
Considering the plant at Factory A it may be a wonder that it turns out
anything at all; considering the first-class outfit at Factory B its
output, though high, may be a great deal lower than it ought to be. No
doubt the good manager at Factory A is going to put in new machinery as
soon as he can, but that takes time. In the meantime low output does not
prove that he is a failure.
(3) And now, let us go a little deeper. The manager is going to put in
new machinery: before Christ has finished with Miss Bates, she is going
to be very “nice” indeed. But if we left it at that, it would sound as
though Christ’s only aim was to pull Miss Bates up to the same level on
which Dick had been all along. We have been talking, in fact, as if Dick
were all right; as if Christianity was something nasty people needed and
nice ones could afford to do without; and as if niceness was all that
God demanded. But this would be a fatal mistake. The truth is that in
God’s eyes Dick Firkin needs “saving” every bit as much as Miss Bates.
In one sense (I will explain what sense in a moment) niceness hardly
comes into the question.
You cannot expect God to look at Dick’s placid temper and friendly
disposition exactly as we do. They result from natural causes which God
Himself creates. Being merely temperamental, they will all disappear if
Dick’s digestion alters. The niceness, in fact, is God’s gift to Dick,
not Dick’s gift to God. In the same way, God has allowed natural causes,
working in a world spoiled by centuries of sin, to produce in Miss Bates
the narrow mind and jangled nerves which account for most of her
nastiness. He intends, in His own good time, to set that part of her
right. But that is not, for God, the critical part of the business. It
presents no difficulties. It is not what He is anxious about. What He is
watching and waiting and working for is something that is not easy even
for God, because, from the nature of the case, even He cannot produce it
by a mere act of power. He is waiting and watching for it both in Miss
Bates and in Dick Firkin. It is something they can freely give Him or
freely refuse to Him. Will they, or will they not, turn to Him and thus
fulfil the only purpose for which they were created? Their free will is
trembling inside them like the needle of a compass. But this is a needle
that can choose. It _can_ point to its true North; but it need not. Will
the needle swing round, and settle, and point to God?
He can help it to do so. He cannot force it. He cannot, so to speak, put
out His own hand and pull it into the right position, for then it would
not be free will any more. Will it point North? That is the question on
which all hangs. Will Miss Bates and Dick offer their natures to God?
The question whether the natures they offer or withhold are, at that
moment, nice or nasty ones, is of secondary importance. God can see to
that part of the problem.
Do not misunderstand me. Of course God regards a nasty nature as a bad
and deplorable thing. And, of course, He regards a nice nature as a good
thing—good like bread, or sunshine, or water. But these are the good
things which He gives and we receive. He created Dick’s sound nerves and
good digestion, and there is plenty more where they came from. It costs
God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert
rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion. And because they are wills they
can—in nice people just as much as in nasty ones—refuse His request. And
then, because that niceness in Dick was merely part of nature, it will
all go to pieces in the end. Nature herself will all pass away. Natural
causes come together in Dick to make a pleasant psychological pattern,
just as they come together in a sunset to make a pleasant pattern of
colours. Presently (for that is how nature works) they will fall apart
again and the pattern in both cases will disappear. Dick has had the
chance to turn (or rather, to allow God to turn) that momentary pattern
into the beauty of an eternal spirit: and he has not taken it.
There is a paradox here. As long as Dick does not turn to God, he thinks
his niceness is his own, and just as long as he thinks that, it is not
his own. It is when Dick realises that his niceness is not his own but a
gift from God, and when he offers it back to God—it is just then that it
begins to be really his own. For now Dick is beginning to take a share
in his own creation. The only things we can keep are the things we
freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we
are sure to lose.
We must, therefore, not be surprised if we find among the Christians
some people who are still nasty. There is even, when you come to think
it over, a reason why nasty people might be expected to turn to Christ
in greater numbers than nice ones. That was what people objected to
about Christ during His life on earth: He seemed to attract “such awful
people.” That is what people still object to, and always will. Do you
not see why? Christ said “Blessed are the poor” and “How hard it is for
the rich to enter the Kingdom,” and no doubt He primarily meant the
economically rich and economically poor. But do not His words also apply
to another kind of riches and poverty? One of the dangers of having a
lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of
happiness money can give and so fail to realise your need for God. If
everything seems to come simply by signing cheques, you may forget that
you are at every moment totally dependent on God. Now quite plainly,
natural gifts carry with them a similar danger. If you have sound nerves
and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you
are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. “Why drag
God into it?” you may ask. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly
easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are
always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad
temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you
agree with them. You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness
is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better
kind of goodness. Often people who have all these natural kinds of
goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need for Christ at all
until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their
self-satisfaction is shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who
are “rich” in this sense to enter the Kingdom.
It is very different for the nasty people—the little, low, timid,
warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual,
unbalanced people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they
learn, in double quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or
nothing for them. It is taking up the cross and following—or else
despair. They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them. They
are (in one very real and terrible sense) the “poor”: He blessed them.
They are the “awful set” He goes about with—and of course the Pharisees
say still, as they said from the first, “If there were anything in
Christianity those people would not be Christians.”
There is either a warning or an encouragement here for every one of us.
If you are a nice person—if virtue comes easily to you—beware! Much is
expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own
merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, and if you are
contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those
gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more
complicated, your bad example more disastrous. The Devil was an
archangel once; his natural gifts were as far above yours as yours are
above those of a chimpanzee.
But if you are a poor creature—poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some
house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels—saddled, by no
choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion—nagged day in
and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best
friends—do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor
whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to
drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but
perhaps far sooner than that) He will fling it on the scrap-heap and
give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all—not least yourself:
for you have learned your driving in a hard school. (Some of the last
will be first and some of the first will be last.)
“Niceness”—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing. We
must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in
our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up
“nice”; just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to
eat. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making
everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people,
content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God,
would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable
world—and might even be more difficult to save.
For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always
improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to
a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into
sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a
new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and
better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once
it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have
been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there
may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it
cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders—no one could
tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings—may even give it
an awkward appearance.
But perhaps we have already spent too long on this question. If what you
want is an argument against Christianity (and I well remember how
eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was
true) you can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and
say, “So there’s your boasted new man! Give me the old kind.” But if
once you have begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds
probable, you will know in your heart that this is only evading the
issue. What can you ever really know of other people’s souls—of their
temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole
creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in
your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You
cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or
memories of what you have read in books. What will all that chatter and
hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the
anæsthetic fog which we call “nature” or “the real world” fades away and
the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate,
and unavoidable?
11
THE NEW MEN
In the last chapter I compared Christ’s work of making New Men to the
process of turning a horse into a winged creature. I used that extreme
example in order to emphasise the point that it is not mere improvement
but Transformation. The nearest parallel to it in the world of nature is
to be found in the remarkable transformations we can make in insects by
applying certain rays to them. Some people think this is how Evolution
worked. The alterations in creatures on which it all depends may have
been produced by rays coming from outer space. (Of course once the
alterations are there, what they call “Natural Selection” gets to work
on them: i.e. the useful alterations survive and the other ones get
weeded out.)
Perhaps a modern man can understand the Christian idea best if he takes
it in connection with Evolution. Everyone now knows about Evolution
(though, of course, some educated people disbelieve it): everyone has
been told that man has evolved from lower types of life. Consequently,
people often wonder “What is the next step? When is the thing beyond man
going to appear?” Imaginative writers try sometimes to picture this next
step—the “Superman” as they call him; but they usually only succeed in
picturing someone a good deal nastier than man as we know him and then
try to make up for that by sticking on extra legs or arms. But supposing
the next step was to be something even more different from the earlier
steps than they ever dreamed of? And is it not very likely it would be?
Thousands of centuries ago huge, very heavily armoured creatures were
evolved. If anyone had at that time been watching the course of
Evolution he would probably have expected that it was going to go on to
heavier and heavier armour. But he would have been wrong. The future had
a card up its sleeve which nothing at that time would have led him to
expect. It was going to spring on him little, naked, unarmoured animals
which had better brains: and with those brains they were going to master
the whole planet. They were not merely going to have more power than the
prehistoric monsters, they were going to have a new kind of power. The
next step was not only going to be different, but different with a new
kind of difference. The stream of Evolution was not going to flow on in
the direction in which he saw it flowing: it was in fact going to take a
sharp bend.
Now it seems to me that most of the popular guesses at the Next Step are
making just the same sort of mistake. People see (or at any rate they
think they see) men developing greater brains and getting greater
mastery over nature. And because they think the stream is flowing in
that direction, they imagine it will go on flowing in that direction.
But I cannot help thinking that the Next Step will be really new; it
will go off in a direction you could never have dreamed of. It would
hardly be worth calling a New Step unless it did. I should expect not
merely difference but a new kind of difference. I should expect not
merely change but a new method of producing the change. Or, to make an
Irish bull, I should expect the next stage in Evolution not to be a
stage in Evolution at all: should expect that Evolution itself as a
method of producing change will be superseded. And finally, I should not
be surprised if, when the thing happened, very few people noticed that
it was happening.
Now, if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is precisely
that the Next Step has already appeared. And it is really new. It is not
a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off
in a totally different direction—a change from being creatures of God to
being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand
years ago. In a sense, the change is not “Evolution” at all, because it
is not something arising out of the natural process of events but
something coming into nature from outside. But that is what I should
expect. We arrived at our idea of “Evolution” from studying the past. If
there are real novelties in store then of course our idea, based on the
past, will not really cover them. And in fact this New Step differs from
all previous ones not only in coming from outside nature but in several
other ways as well.
(1) It is not carried on by sexual reproduction. Need we be surprised at
that? There was a time before sex had appeared; development used to go
on by different methods. Consequently, we might have expected that there
would come a time when sex disappeared, or else (which is what is
actually happening) a time when sex, though it continued to exist,
ceased to be the main channel of development.
(2) At the earlier stages living organisms have had either no choice or
very little choice about taking the new step. Progress was, in the main,
something that happened to them, not something that they did. But the
new step, the step from being creatures to being sons, is voluntary. At
least, voluntary in one sense. It is not voluntary in the sense that we,
of ourselves, could have chosen to take it or could even have imagined
it; but it is voluntary in the sense that when it is offered to us we
can refuse it. We can, if we please, shrink back; we can dig in our
heels and let the new Humanity go on without us.
(3) I have called Christ the “first instance” of the new man. But of
course He is something much more than that. He is not merely a new man,
one specimen of the species, but _the_ new man. He is the origin and
centre and life of all the new men. He came into the created universe,
of His own will, bringing with Him the _Zoe_, the new life. (I mean new
to us, of course: in its own place _Zoe_ has existed for ever and ever.)
And He transmits it not by heredity but by what I have called “good
infection.” Everyone who gets it gets it by personal contact with Him.
Other men become “new” by being “in Him.”
(4) This step is taken at a different speed from the previous ones.
Compared with the development of man on this planet, the diffusion of
Christianity over the human race seems to go like a flash of
lightning—for two thousand years is almost nothing in the history of the
universe. (Never forget that we are all still “the early Christians.”
The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a
disease of infancy: we are still teething. The outer world, no doubt,
thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has
thought that very often before. Again and again it has thought
Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without or
corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the
physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary
movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first
disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In
a sense—and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to
them—that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing
that He started: and each time, just as they are patting down the earth
on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even
broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us.)
(5) The stakes are higher. By falling back at the earlier steps a
creature lost, at the worst, its few years of life on this earth: very
often it did not lose even that. By falling back at this step we lose a
prize which is (in the strictest sense of the word) infinite. For now
the critical moment has arrived. Century by century God has guided
nature up to the point of producing creatures which can (if they will)
be taken right out of nature, turned into “gods.” Will they allow
themselves to be taken? In a way, it is like the crisis of birth. Until
we rise and follow Christ we are still parts of Nature, still in the
womb of our great mother. Her pregnancy has been long and painful and
anxious, but it has reached its climax. The great moment has come.
Everything is ready. The Doctor has arrived. Will the birth “go off all
right”? But of course it differs from an ordinary birth in one important
respect. In an ordinary birth the baby has not much choice: here it has.
I wonder what an ordinary baby would do if it had the choice. It might
prefer to stay in the dark and warmth and safety of the womb. For of
course it would think the womb meant safety. That would be just where it
was wrong; for if it stays there it will die.
On this view the thing has happened: the new step has been taken and is
being taken. Already the new men are dotted here and there all over the
earth. Some, as I have admitted, are still hardly recognisable: but
others can be recognised. Every now and then one meets them. Their very
voices and faces are different from ours; stronger, quieter, happier,
more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They are, I say,
recognisable; but you must know what to look for. They will not be very
like the idea of “religious people” which you have formed from your
general reading. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to
think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to
you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less. (We
must get over wanting to be needed: in some goodish people, specially
women, that is the hardest of all temptations to resist.) They will
usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from.
When you have recognised one of them, you will recognise the next one
much more easily. And I strongly suspect (but how should I know?) that
they recognise one another immediately and infallibly, across every
barrier of colour, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to
become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the
very lowest, it must be great _fun_.
But you must not imagine that the new men are, in the ordinary sense,
all alike. A good deal of what I have been saying in this last book
might make you suppose that that was bound to be so. To become new men
means losing what we now call “ourselves.” Out of ourselves, into
Christ, we must go. His will is to become ours and we are to think His
thoughts, to “have the mind of Christ” as the Bible says. And if Christ
is one, and if He is thus to be “in” us all, shall we not be exactly the
same? It certainly sounds like it; but in fact it is not so.
It is difficult here to get a good illustration; because, of course, no
other two things are related to each other just as the Creator is
related to one of His creatures. But I will try two very imperfect
illustrations which may give a hint of the truth. Imagine a lot of
people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe
to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into
the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all
reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite
possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the
same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e. all reflecting
it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light
will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are. Or again,
suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to
taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell
him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. Might he
not reply “In that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the
same: because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so
strong that it will kill the taste of everything else.” But you and I
know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from
killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually
brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the
salt. (Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a very good
illustration, because you can, after all, kill the other tastes by
putting in too much salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human
personality by putting in too much Christ. I am doing the best I can.)
It is something like that with Christ and us. The more we get what we
now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more
truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and
millions of “little Christs,” all different, will still be too few to
express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents
characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended
to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It
is no good trying to “be myself” without Him. The more I resist Him and
try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity
and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so
proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting place for trains of
events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call “My
wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or
pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by
devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real
origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal
and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in
the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I
regard as my own personal political ideals. I am not, in my natural
state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I
call “me” can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ,
when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a
real personality of my own.
At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go
further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you
have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness
is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who
surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and
conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away
“blindly” so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality:
but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own
personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at
all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether.
Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just
because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It
will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The
same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in
social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until
you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in
literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be
original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring
twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of
ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs
through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find
your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death,
death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your
whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you
will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not
given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died
will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find
in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.
But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else
thrown in.
Footnotes
[1]I do not think it is the whole story, as you will see later. I mean
that, as far as the argument has gone up to date, it may be.
[2]See Note at the end of this chapter.
[3]One listener complained of the word _damned_ as frivolous swearing.
But I mean exactly what I say—nonsense that is _damned_ is under
God’s curse, and will (apart from God’s grace) lead those who
believe it to eternal death.
[4]This corporate behaviour may, of course, be either better or worse
than their individual behaviour.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
_Theology_
MIRACLES
THE PILGRIM’S REGRESS
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS
BROADCAST TALKS
CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR
BEYOND PERSONALITY
TRANSPOSITION AND OTHER ADDRESSES
THE GREAT DIVORCE
GEORGE MACDONALD: ANTHOLOGY
_Social Theory_
THE ABOLITION OF MAN
_Literary Criticism_
(_published by the Oxford University Press_)
THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE
REHABILITATIONS
A PREFACE TO “PARADISE LOST”
HAMLET, THE PRINCE OR THE POEM
(_in collaboration with E. M. W. Tillyard_)
THE PERSONAL HERESY
_Romances_
(_published by John Lane, The Bodley Head_)
OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET
PERELANDRA
THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH
_For Children_
PRINCE CASPIAN
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
THE VOYAGE OF THE “DAWN TREADER”
Transcriber’s Notes
--Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public
domain in the country of publication.
--Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and
dialect unchanged.
--Provided an original cover image, for free and unrestricted use with
this Distributed Proofreaders-Canada eBook.
--Only in the text versions, delimited italicized text in _underscores_
(the HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)
[The end of _Mere Christianity_ by C.S. Lewis]